This morning I was speaking on the phone with a fellow librarian who mentioned that she wasn't able to get her hospital to pay for the annual Meeting despite the fact that they will pay for her MLA and AHIP dues. I mentioned to her that she should look at and apply for some of the MLA scholarships that are available to attend meetings and continuing education. I realize it is too late to look for scholarships for this year's annual meeting, but there is time for the future meetings. MLA is going to a lot of neat cities.

There is the "Continuing Education Awards"MLA members may submit applications for these awards of $100 to $500 to develop their knowledge of the theoretical, administrative, or technical aspects of librarianship. More than one continuing education (CE) award may be offered in a year and may be used either for MLA courses or for other CE activities.
Note in 1999 it wasn't awarded. I guess that year everybody had money to attend a CE course.

There is the "EBSCO/MLA Annual Meeting Grant"This scholarship is sponsored by EBSCO Information Services and enables MLA members to attend the association's annual meeting. Each year awards of up to $1,000 for travel and conference-related expenses will be given to four librarians who would otherwise be unable to attend the meeting. Applicants must be currently employed as health sciences librarians and have between two and five years' experience in a health sciences library.

There are the "Hospital Libraries Section/MLA Professional Development Grants"This award, sponsored by the Hospital Libraries Section, provides librarians working in hospital and similar clinical settings with the support needed for educational or research activities. This award was established in 1996, and is given twice each year. Application deadlines are August 1 and February 1.
Note in 2002 it wasn't awarded. I guess hospital librarians must have had an abundance of professional development money that year.

Just doing a brief cursory search through the Chapter websites I found at least 8 chapters that have professional development, continuing education, or meeting attendance awards.

There are a lot of outside funding opportunities available to new medical librarians or first time conference attendees. Not as much for mid career librarians who have been to a conference before. This might be one area to develop. I know that I was very lucky at my previous job because my hospital paid for my attendance at the annual meetings. If they didn't, I would have been out of luck for any award where the criteria stated that I would have had to be a first time meeting attendee. Perhaps I am wrong, but I think there are some 15-20 year career hospital librarians out there who would like to go to an annual meeting more than once in their entire career.

I decided to sit down and figure out my schedule of what I plan on doing and seeing while at MLA. I futzed around for an hour with the Online Event Planner and I just couldn't get it to remember the right events (despite clicking on the add them to my itinerary button). So I am going old school. I printed out (sorry I know we are supposed to go green) the PDF of the schedule from the Preliminary Program and wrote in the sessions I wanted to attend.

As I looked at the various sessions, I noticed there were several things that I am interested in attending. Unfortunately I can't attend everything due to prior commitments and/or two programs of interest scheduled at the same time. Thankfully there will be other MLA Bloggers attending and writing about their programs, so hopefully I will be able keep informed.

One event I plan to attend is the Bearded Pigs. They will be playing Sunday night, May 18, from 8:00 to 11:00 in Crystal C of the Hyatt and thankfully I have no other conflicting plans. If you are new to MLA or just haven't heard of the Bearded Pigs, they are musically talented medical librarians who put on a great gig at the annual meeting.

If you are up for a little rock and roll and meeting some people, you should check them out. Here is the information.

Sunday night, May 18, from 8:00 to 11:00 in Crystal C of the Hyatt
Cash bar.
You can show your support and buy a Bearded Pig button $2 each prior to the event and $3 each after. If you see one of the pigs prior to the event ask for one.
All are welcome to the "Informal professional networking event with rock band and cash bar." Any proceeds remaining are donated to the MLA Scholarship Fund

Labels: MLA2008

If you were ever curious as to how medical librarianship might work virtually in Second Life, you might want to check out the final project report from the Alliance Library System. The project, "Providing Consumer Health Outreach and Library Programs to Virtual World Residents in Second Life," provided outreach to virtual medical communities, health training and information for residents of Second Life, links to consumer health resources, one-on-one support to residents, and part-time staffing for HealthInfo Island.

You might also be interested in an April 2008 article "Real World 101 in Second Life: A Discussion with Carol Perryman/Carolina Keats" UNYOC/MLA Newsletter p8-12.

It is May Ovid is making Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology available as their resource of the month.

Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology is designed to meet the growing demand for tightly focused information in areas at the cutting edge of cardiology. It will include outstanding investigations of a more focused nature that have been selected through the same rigorous review process, subject to the same high standards, as articles in Circulation.

You can Try it now at Ovid

On a personal note...
Is it just me or has Ovid started sticking more of its journals as free resources of the month rather than its databases? I would like to see a database or perhaps a journal collection listed as Ovid's resource of the month rather than one little journal. I usually try and follow and post each month on Ovid's free resource, but I think if they are going to get into the habit of listing only one journal as a resource then I am not going to post about it. What used to be a nice opportunity to freely use and learn about a database, has kind of lost its usefulness for me.

A few months have gone by and we have been able to look at and use Ovid's new interface for some time. In previous posts, I created a list of people who posted their own online documentation or training videos. For the most part these were people who focused on Ovid Advanced. Now there are some people and libraries out their who have chosen to use Ovid Basic and I thought it might be a good idea to list a few of them.

Some guides and information on Ovid Basic:
Librarians' RX - How to Use OvidSP’s Basic Search
St. John's Libraries - How Does Basic Search Work?
University of Ulster Library -OvidSP a Basic User Guide
CABI.org - Simple Searching CABI Abstracts Using OvidSP
University of Salford - OvidSP
Himmelfarb Library Blog -Natural Language Searching in MEDLINE (and more) on OvidSP

Hopefully this might be helpful for people in libraries that have decided to go with OvidSP Basic.

Do you know what library resources your doctors are accessing through your hospital's electronic medical record? Most librarians do not. Unfortunately most librarians have been shut out of the electronic medical record roll out. There are numerous reasons why this is unfortunate, one of which is the library's license agreements. The license agreements for electronic resources vary. Some are extremely complicated. Some prohibit off campus access and ILL. Some have strict definitions of what is an authorized user.


Why should you be concerned about your hospital's electronic medical record system and the library's electronic resources? Because there are some electronic medical record systems that allow doctors to add their own links to information resources. You got it, doctors can add links to your resources and access them within the medical record, making these electronic resources available off campus. Depending on your hospital, this could also mean that private practice doctors (i.e. for profit entity) could be accessing resources as well as other unauthorized users (according to the license agreement). Simply put, these doctors may be authorized to access the medical record, but they may not be authorized to access the library resources within the medical record.


Believe it or not this is already happening. Depending on the electronic medical record system, doctors can add links to library resources within the medical record. Online journals, textbooks, drug guides, society websites, and point of care databases (such as UpToDate) all can be added as information resources accessible within the electronic medical record. A doctor (and anybody else with electronic medical record access) can use these resources from his home and his medical office building. Depending on the resource this may be a violation of the library's license agreement.


Librarians not only need to be aware of what resources their doctors find helpful to answer clinical questions but they also need to know the licensing implications. Your hospital IT personnel are going to be concerned about the security of patient data, and rightfully so. Most likely they will be completely unaware of the software and vendor license agreements the library has and the implications for use within the electronic medical record. After all, imagine what would happen if one of your doctors added a link to UpToDate to use within the electronic medical record thereby enabling UpToDate to be available from off campus? I can probably speak for many librarians in saying that would be very bad.

***Update***
I know not everybody reads comments in blog posts and Marie made a comment that made me realize that I left off something VERY important.

It may not matter if you restrict your resources to a specific IP range! The doctor viewing the electronic medical record is already virtually sitting on your IP range, and your resources are available to him off site. I know of instances where libraries have tunred off proxy access and limited access to specific IP ranges to certain resources not licensed for off campus access, yet the doctor was able to use them off campus while he was within ERM.