MLA Annual Meeting Report from Carrie Grinstead
Posted on June 9, 2017 by Bethany Myers | 1 Comment
Carrie Grinstead
My first MLA meeting was an amazing experience. At the New Members/First-Time Attendees Breakfast on Sunday morning, MJ Tooey presented the Medical Library Association as the “professional home” for health science librarians. The meeting absolutely helped me feel more at home in MLA, and it increased my love for the medical library profession.
The First-Time Attendees Breakfast included a speed-dating session, in which we had three-minute conversations. I got to reconnect with librarians I met at MLGSCA last year and to meet librarians from all over the country. In my work with Providence Health & Services, I’m part of a team that is distributed across four states; since I work alone most of the time, it was invigorating to connect face-to-face with fellow health science library professionals.
Teresa L. Knott’s Presidential Address made me proud to be a member of MLA. I was especially happy to hear her report on advocacy efforts at the national level, including a trip to Washington, DC in April to advocate for continued funding for the Institute of Museum & Library Services.
The plenary sessions were extraordinary. Julie Angus has made it her life’s work to use expeditions as analogies for big projects in life. I would never have thought analogies could be drawn between library work and rowing across the Atlantic Ocean, but the lessons Ms. Angus presented can definitely be applied to any challenge. Perhaps most important was her recognition that change can be hard to deal with, and it is in our nature to seek stability. However, learning how to embrace opportunities is crucial for our success and happiness. Julia F. Sollenberger used concepts from the biopsychosocial model of health and disease to deliver a moving message about compassion and kindness. Her words were especially welcome given the contentious political climate in this country.
I hope to incorporate outreach to patients and consumers into my professional work. The chapter roundtable lunch on consumer health gave me great ideas for doing this, as did a session on the Engage for Health program.
I attended several exciting lightning talks, including a report on a project to harvest and organize CDS content following a migration from a home-grown EHR to Epic. I’m about to finish a graduate certificate in clinical informatics, and so I loved hearing about librarians applying their skills to clinical systems. I also got to learn about informatics projects through poster sessions, and I particularly liked reading about a project involving embedding evidence into clinical order sets. Other lightning talks and posters exposed me to practice areas in which I don’t have much experience, such as contract negotiation.
In addition to the packed programming, the meeting gave me a chance to meet three of the other librarians on my team at Providence for the first time, touch base with supervisors from positions I held as a student, and start new friendships. It was an extremely busy and fulfilling weekend, and I’m excited to engage more with MLA through MEDLIB-ED courses, section and chapter memberships, and future national meetings.
-by Carrie Grinstead
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June 9th, 2017 @ 11:13 am
nice report Carrie! I think your birdy-guy likes you 🙂