MLA Connections

As I was sitting in the Portland, Maine airport waiting for my delayed flight back home to North Carolina, I had a chance to reflect on another excellent chapter meeting. The North Atlantic Health Sciences Libraries met at Samoset Resort on the Maine coast. Attendance was good (about 120 members) considering the current economic situation. The theme for this meeting was “What’s cooking? A Taste of the Future. The planning committee carried this theme throughout the meeting by wearing branded aprons so attendees could easily identify them. There were 3 keynote speakers:

• Stuart Weibel of OCLC Research who explained and demystified the Semantic Web; Check out the Ted Talk by Hans Rosling that demonstrates the power of the Semantic Web.
• Dr. Judith Blake showed us how the semantic Web is being used by scientists to support function genomics, genetics, and phenotypic research;
• Peter Suber of SPARC closed the conference with a session on Open Access.

There were several repeated breakout sessions. I attended the session by Lei Wang from Yale Health Sciences Library who was an excellent speaker and took us through the issues related to Open Source Tools for Librarians and why it is imperative that librarians support open source.

This chapter had a major issue to vote on at the Business meeting—a possible name change from NAHSL to New England Chapter/MLA. The vote required a 2/3 majority to pass; the vote was split with 38 for and 37 against! Katherine R. Stemmer Frumento was elected Chair of NAHSL.  The banquet featured a surprise entertainer—Robert Washington, who brought Elvis the King back to life for us.

I have a powerful example of the value of the Vital Pathways Project. A hospital librarian from NAHSL told me that her library had been under threat of closure. Her boss gave her one chance to prepare a 2-page rationale for maintaining library services for the hospital. She called a few colleagues for help, but in the end she found the materials on the Vital Pathways page to be the most useful. She wanted us to know that she credits this material with saving her library!

Check out the NAHSL Blog for more feedback on the meeting.

A post script to the meeting from Dina McKelvy: There is a project called PEOTagger to tag Medline abstracts for PICO elements. A summary of the project is here:

http://martindawes.ca/research/PECODR/PECODR_background.html

Elvis at the NAHSL Banquet