Before the MLA Annual Meeting, I had volunteered to serve as a mentor for the Medical Library Association’s Colleague Connection Program.  The program matches returning members with first time attendees.  Mentors help guide their mentee through the extensive program and give them a sense of community by introducing them to other medical librarians, telling them about social events, going out to eat, or walking around the city.  Before the meeting my mentee, Jennifer Douthit, and I exchanged emails and photographs and agreed to meet at the Welcome Reception on Saturday, May 16^th.   We also met my roommate, Penny, and her mentee, Emily, that evening and walked around the Exhibit Area, while enjoying a few hors d’oeuvres. The next morning the four of us attended the New Members/First Time Attendees Program and Breakfast.  There were welcoming remarks by the MLA President, Linda Walton).  Then iconic Lucretia McClure talked about the changes that she has seen in medical librarianship over several decades and asked the new members to reflect on what they might expect in their future careers.  After breakfast, we had an activity where each of us would find a new person to speak with for three minutes.  After three minutes we would find another person.  This activity lasted thirty minutes and allowed us to make many new acquaintances.

Over the course of the meeting Jen and I learned more about our different career paths and families.  Jen is a librarian at a medical device company.  Her previous experience was in technical services in a large public library.   She made the most of her time at the meeting by arriving on Thursday to attend two continuing education courses on instructional design.  At her current job, she will be providing training.  We discussed how to best tackle the meeting program and the benefits of using the online planner and meeting app.   I told Jen that after the meeting we would have an opportunity to view recorded sessions that conflicted with the sessions that we decided to attend.  We touched base at a couple of sessions, shared some meals, and went for a walk to the Congress Avenue Bridge.

On Sunday, I also attended the MLA Presidential address by outgoing president, Linda Walton, where she talked about the past year’s accomplishments.  Her slides included information on a letter written by MLA to the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education regarding library support for colleges of pharmacy and the revised Draft Standards for 2016.  This and input from other groups helped to put the “L”-word back into the standards.

Mae Jemison, a physician and the first woman of color to go into space as an astronaut, was an inspiring plenary speaker, who talked about her support for science literacy and her involvement with various organizations.  She is leading the 100 Year Starship initiative to ensure that humans will be prepared for intersteller travel within the next hundred years.

The Pharmacy and Drug Information Section sponsored some special sessions.  One that I found particularly informative, was the Access Pharmacy panel on “Serving English Language Learners.”  Strategies to educate English learners about their health included using demonstrations and practice, integrating native language literacy, using popular songs regarding diseases such as diabetes to begin a session, and encouraging them to tell their stories to empower the learner.  Another panelist from the MD Anderson Cancer Center talked about serving highly educated people with limited English skills.  He encouraged us to use complete sentences when answering questions, to speak and stress syllables and words within a sentence in a normal manner, and to smile.   One of my colleagues at the University of Iowa, Xiaomei Gu, talked about the librarian’s role in a research university.  She served on a task force with a variety of university staff, students and faculty members.  They created a list of library staff language skills, conducted focus groups, and created a library guide.  Another useful session talked about the different perspectives of students versus librarians and wants versus needs.

There were many sessions on interprofessional education.  One session which I attended was on interprofessional clinical informatics education and practice sponsored by the Collection Development Section.  My colleague, Sarah McCord discussed the findings of her systematic review of the literature on the assessment of this topic.  She found Helena M. VonVille’s Excel Workbooks for Systematic Reviews, licensed under a Creative Commons License useful.  Links to the workbooks can be found at http://libguides.sph.uth.tmc.edu/excel_workbook_home.

If anyone wants to talk about what I learned about updates to PubMed at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) booth in the exhibits area, please let me know.  At the NLM Update session, they discussed the National Institutes of Health Director search, research data access and clinical trial data, new data management plan guidance to be released for public comments, PubMed journal selection, linking an ORCID ID to PubMed, PubMed Commons – a forum for scientific discussion of articles, feedback requested on Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) RDF linked data, responsive web design, embedding learn.nlm.nih.gov in training resources, and NLM collections and exhibits.  Questions from the audience included the issue that status tags are no longer available in the summary view and inconsistent inversion of MeSH entry terms.

The final two plenary speakers on Wednesday talked about two hot topics.  Ann McKee, who serves on the Mackey-White Traumatic Brain Injury Committee for the Players’ Association of the National Football League, presented her research on CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy).  Discussion after the talk considered other areas of CTE concern, particularly women athletes and abused women.

Eszter Hargittai, a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University, presented her research on the role of internet skills or how people can benefit from their digital media use.  She talked about her research techniques and what to look for to be sure that the research is credible.  Higher skilled internet users use advertisements and user-generated resources in a cautious way.  Bias toward resources that confirm our opinions is common.  For example, if we believe that pregnant women should not drink at all, we will be drawn to resources that confirm our belief.  Dr. Hargittai found that skill and socioeconomic status differences have persisted over time and may be increasing.

After the meeting I was able to renew a friendship that dates back to Junior High and to visit my son in Arizona.  Time away was well spent.