Hospital Librarianship: Keeping Traditions and Bridging to Innovations: (Re)Vitalizing Your Career and Your Library

Date: Tuesday, April 29, 2025, 1:00pm–4:00pm

All courses will take place on Tuesday, April 29, 2025, in Pittsburgh, PA. Courses are not available virtually.

To register, see MLA ’25 Registration

Helen-Ann and Heidi Sue, two highly-experienced hospital librarians, will inspire you and lead you in free-flowing brainstorming, activities, discussions, and plan- making that will activate your passions and breathe new life into your medical librarianship career and into your library! If you are looking for a single course that can both aid you in your career and provide value to your library, this is it!

Through group discussions and exercises, you’ll rate your job satisfaction and the performance of your library, identify traditional hospital library services and their related librarian skills, pin-point services that can be refreshed and the skills required to implement them, and make a plan to add at least one new service.

Group discussions will surface creative ideas for new services, tools, and programs that you can implement, such as using a generative AI tool for reference, becoming a member of a committee not typical of librarians, partnering with, and other new and unique value-added services your patrons will appreciate. In the process, you’ll gain an overview of the history and trends of hospital library services and the place of a library in a hospital or health system.

You’ll leave the class with ideas and plans for making traditional services fresh and for gaining new knowledge and with a feeling of being renewed, invigorated, less fearful, and psyched to add innovations to your work and with one or more workable plans to do or add something new upon your return to your library.

Audience

Hospital librarians and those with an interest in hospital librarianship.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

List typical hospital library programs and services
Describe the place of a library within the hospital or health system
Articulate and act on plans to bridge transitional services to new resources and new technologies

MLA CE: 3

Instructors

Helen-Ann Brown Epstein, AHIP, FMLA is the solo Informationist at Virtua Health, Marlton, NJ, where her digital library allows her to make rounds each morning. Helen-Ann is celebrating her 50^th year as a hospital librarian. She has had the privilege of mentoring future hospital librarians and representing hospital libraries on the MLA Vision 2048 Task Force. For ten years, she taught the Health Information Concentration at the Pratt Graduate School of Library and Information Science.

Heidi Sue Adams, MS is the Lead Medical Librarian at Logan Health, Kalispell, Montana. In her first medical library position, she intentionally acquired experience in a range of areas of librarianship–circulation, ILL, reference, serials, technical services, and systems librarianship. Over the last 30 years, she has learned how to engage and re-engage, keeping her career refreshingly delightful in a variety of trying times, always with an eye to thriving.