Have you noticed the changes in the schedule for MLA ’20? The most obvious is that the meeting is a little shorter with the Janet Doe Lecture and reception closing MLA ’20 on Tuesday evening. Another change is that the Tuesday evening reception is included with the standard registration. If you are registering for the entire meeting, you really are registering for the entire meeting!
Both of these changes are based on feedback received on the past few years’ evaluations. Everyone—even those of us living in places that are difficult to get to—will be able to get home on Wednesday. And no one will have to miss part of the meeting because of extra cost.
MLA ’20 will close on Tuesday evening with the most “medical librarian” event of the meeting: the Janet Doe Lecture. Always presented by a distinguished member, the lecture was established in 1966 to commemorate the leadership of Janet Doe, MLA president in 1948/49, library director at the New York Academy of Medicine from 1949 to 1956, and editor of the first two editions of the Handbook of Medical Library Practice.* Join us to listen to and learn from lecturer Chris Shaffer, AHIP, university librarian at the University of California–San Francisco, about MLA’s leadership positions in open access and open science, which are changing the way medical librarians work, and then stay to celebrate our profession at the post-lecture reception.
There are other tweaks to the schedule, too. For example, contributed papers and immersion sessions have been moved to earlier in the day on Sunday and Monday and the MLA Business Meeting and Presidential Inaugural Address will be held in the late afternoon on Monday. Be sure to check the Preliminary Program and the Schedule-at-a-Glance to get your future—or at least MLA ’20—in focus!
* Janet Doe. Bull Med Libr Assoc. 1957 Jul;45(3):281–84. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC233411/