MLA '05: An Invitation to Attend
The 2005 National Program Committee invites you to head to Texas in May for a celebration of our future and our diversity. As MLA President Joanne Marshall, AHIP, FMLA, stated in her 2004/05 inaugural address, "librarians must embrace diversity locally and globally." Member contributions, guest speakers, and exhibitors will showcase the many different ways diversity will impact medical libraries in the future.
Our theme shouts out the positive, inspiring, and passionate feeling
we have about our profession and ourselves. Join your colleagues in discovering
how we all continue to provide a variety of services and resources that
respond to the varied needs of the many different populations we serve.
The contributed papers and poster sessions will focus on five themes as we explore our future: clinical services, diversity, education and outreach, research, and technology.
- Learn how integrative medicine is impacting consumers and clinical
care.
- Explore how medical libraries, with their staffs and resources, now
serve a diverse global community with different languages, different
cultures, different beliefs and traditions, different levels of comfort
with new things, and different levels of technology to access information
but all with a common mission of improving health and eradicating disease.
- Appreciate that "information" now comes in containers of
different colors, shapes, and sizes displayed on all kinds of gadgets,
and it comes through battery charges and cables and bounces off satellites
in the sky or wireless access point in the ceiling.
- Look at how technology is affecting digitization, preservation, and
open access initiatives.
- Explore who is working in our libraries and what they are doing.
- Learn about someone who had to overcome adversity to make a significant
contribution in medicine.
- Hear presentations by current or recently graduated students from
library and information science programs.
- Get ideas about how libraries can meet the information needs of both
clinical practitioners and bioinformaticians.
- Find out the results of a recent MLA survey of the membership that
asked, "What individuals are educating themselves in medical informatics
and medical librarianship; how they are educating themselves; and for
what kinds of jobs are they educating themselves?"
- Learn how to conduct a reference interview with an emotionally distracted,
mentally ill, or challenging patron.
- Look at leveraging diverse health information sources in information
literacy training while understanding copyright, plagiarism, and bibliographic
software.
- Understand how cloning impacts ethical issues and human medicine.
And, finally, discover how to conduct research for librarianship.
What better place to celebrate diversity and the future than San Antonio. Now the eighth largest city in the United States, the city has retained its sense of history and tradition, while carefully adding cosmopolitan progress. The city has long been a crossroads and a meeting place. Sounds and flavors of Old Mexico, Europe, the Wild West, African Americans, Native Americans, and the Deep South mingle and merge.
The official meeting hotels are the San Antonio Marriott Rivercenter and Riverwalk. The hotels are conveniently located across the street from the Henry B. González Convention Center. Everything this incredible city has to offer is just steps away including unique dining, shopping, and famous historical attractions such as the Alamo and the River Walk.
—Elaine Russo Martin
—Linda Walton
Cochairs, 2005 National Program Committee
