Medical Library Association | Education : Disaster Information Specialization Program

Disaster Health Information Sources: The Basics

Disaster Health Information Sources: The Basics provides a comprehensive overview of the essential resources needed to provide health-related information services for supporting disaster mitigation, planning, response, and recovery. This case-based workshop will cover key sources from the National Library of Medicine (NLM), federal and nonfederal agencies, and international organizations. Tools for locating, organizing and disseminating disaster health information will also be discussed. Suitable for medical and public librarians, this course is a foundational class for the new Disaster Information Specialization program. This project is funded by a contract with the Disaster Information Management Research Center, Specialized Information Services Division, National Library of Medicine.

Register Now (Available now)
Indivduals can now register to view the original program "On-demand." Register, participate and earn 3 MLA CE contact hours. (After you register, you will receive an email with the login information and details for earning your certificate for participating.)

Homework and Resources for Course
Here you will find links to Disaster Health Information (DHI) sources, and tools for organizing and disseminating DHI. Available on MLA's Moodle site. To view, login as a guest. For homework, participants are asked to review the resources for the course available on MLA's Moodle Server. You will need to complete this prior to completing the online evaluation.

Course Instructor
Robin Featherstone recently accepted a position at McGill University's Life Sciences Library and will assume the role of liaison librarian this October. She has worked as a medical librarian at Montreal General Hospital (McGill University Health Centre), the University of Western Ontario, and Yale University, where she completed the second year of the National Library of Medicine's Associate Fellowship Program. Featherstone is excited to combine her passion for teaching with her research interest in libraries and disasters. She began her investigations as an associate fellow at the National Library of Medicine, where she conducted an oral history project on library roles in disaster response (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18974811). Featherstone interviewed librarians from across the United States and Canada, recording their stories of responding to hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, pandemics, man-made disasters, floods, and fires. With a desire to further understand disaster information needs, she began a qualitative case series in 2009 of disaster information provision to health care providers during the H1N1 pandemic. Preliminary research findings have been presented at two major conferences, including the Disaster Information Outreach: A Symposium for Information Professionals Meeting Disaster Health Information Needs, and a manuscript has been submitted to the Journal of the Medical Library Association. As an instructional librarian, for both McGill University Health Centre and the University of Western Ontario, she has taught more than sixty workshops on using health information (http://www.slideshare.net/featherr). Featherstone has developed "Disaster Health Information Sources: The Basics" to be a practical introductory course, drawing on real-life cases and acknowledging the unique challenges and opportunities encountered when providing disaster information.

Technical Information
All technical and audio information, including testing your system, will be provided after you register.

For more information, contact Debra Cavanaugh, mlapd3@mlahq.org, 312.419.9094 x32.

This project is funded by the National Library of Medicine under contract HHS-N-276-2010-00782-P.