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Professional Development

2019 Monthly Webinars

January 29

From Protocol to Publication: Maximizing the Return on Your Systematic Review Investment

An informationist, a project manager, and a methodologist/clinician who are experienced with systematic reviews share their strategies for identifying promising projects, avoiding problems before they scuttle a project, and working with review teams to conduct successful—and published!—systematic reviews.

Whitney A. Townsend is an informationist in the Taubman Health Sciences Library at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor. She has been a member of numerous systematic and scoping review teams, she instructs on systematic review searching and methodology for residents, fellows, and faculty, and she is an instructor for the University of Michigan systematic review workshop. She led the development and publication of a set of competencies for librarians who are involved in systematic reviews that was awarded the 2018 MLA Ida and George Eliot Prize.

Jason D. Mann is a senior research associate in the Department of Internal Medicine and project manager for the Patient Safety Enhancement Programs, Systematic Reviews, University of Michigan–Ann Arbor. In his four years with the group, he has been involved in publishing eight systematic reviews. He is currently overseeing six ongoing systematic reviews and specializes in reviewing the efficacy and operationalization of selected review topics.

RJ Schildhouse is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan in the Department of Hospital Medicine and the section chief of Hospital Medicine at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System. He has completed two systematic reviews as primary author (with more in progress) while balancing a full clinical and administrative workload.

February 13

Helping Science Succeed: The Librarian’s Role in Addressing the Reproducibility Crisis

Headlines and scholarly publications portray a crisis in biomedical and related sciences. In this webinar, you will learn what the crisis is and the vital role of librarians in addressing it. You will see how you can directly and immediately support reproducible and rigorous research using your expertise and library services. You will explore reproducibility guidelines and recommendations and develop an action plan for engaging researchers and stakeholders at your institution.

Franklin Sayre is a liaison librarian at the College of Pharmacy, University of Minnesota. He teaches evidence-based practice and supports reproducible research and computational methods at his institution.

Amy Riegelman is a social sciences librarian at the University of Minnesota, where she serves as the liaison to psychology, educational psychology, child development, and speech-language-hearing sciences. She coleads a library systematic review service and has published and presented on reproducibility, preprints, and identification of retracted articles.

Riegelman and Syre have published together on the reproducibility crisis and maintain the Reproducibility Bibliography site at their university.

March 14

Take Your Research Guides from Good to Great

Learn how to apply user-research methods to make your guides more user friendly and more accessible to users, including those with disabilities. Learn how to use LibGuides’ built-in statistics and other web analytics tools to get detailed and actionable data that you can use to improve your guides.

Andy Hickner is a health sciences librarian at the Interprofessional Health Sciences Library & Information Commons, Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ, and an experienced web professional and LibGuides expert. His experience includes serving on the Yale University Libraries (YUL) LibGuides Advisory Group, developing best practices and recommendations for YUL guides, and ensuring that guides comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines standards.

April 17

Serving Patrons with Disabilities in Your Library or Clinic

Learn how to create welcoming environments and communicate clearly with people with disabilities in academic and hospital settings. Through a hands-on activity, discussion, live quizzes, and information on resources that address the health information needs of people with disabilities, you will be better able to assist people with disabilities and the clinicians who treat them.

Christine Willis, AHIP, is the director of knowledge management and learning resources at Shepherd Center in Atlanta, GA. She has published in multiple library journals and has taught continuing education courses for local, regional, and national library associations and at the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine annual meetings. She is a column editor for the Journal of Hospital Librarianship and is the current editor of the MLA News.

May

See you at MLA ’19 in Chicago!

June

June is a “critical” month at MLA, with two webinars on critical appraisal, one on improving research evaluation skills and one on fostering the critical appraisal skills of staff and students.

June 11

Critical Appraisal for Librarians: Evaluating Randomized Controlled Trials

Cultivate your evidence-based practice (EBP) and critical appraisal skills by learning to appraise the validity of randomized controlled trials. Librarians who teach EBP, provide high-quality evidence to patrons, attend or facilitate journal clubs, or participate in systematic reviews will benefit from the skills taught in this webinar.

Megan von Isenburg, AHIP, is associate dean for library services and archives at the Duke University School of Medicine, co-director of the evidence-based medicine (EBM) course for medical students, and adjunct faculty at the University of North Carolina (UNC)–Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, where she co-teaches the “EBP and the Medical Librarian” online course with Sarah Cantrell.

Sarah Cantrell is the associate director for research and education at the Duke University Medical Center Library & Archives, liaison to the Graduate Medical Education programs at Duke Health, co-director for Duke’s national EBM workshop for clinicians and librarians, and adjunct faculty at the UNC–Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, where she co-teaches the “EBP and the Medical Librarian” online course with von Isenburg.

June 26

Critical Contributions: Developing Research Appraisal Skills at Your Institution

Librarians have a vital and important role to play in building the critical appraisal skills of the students, health care providers, and staff at their institutions. This webinar helps you better understand critical appraisal concepts and equips you with strategies for increasing your involvement in the curriculum at your institution.

Abraham Wheeler, AHIP, designs and teaches evidence-based medicine (EBM) at the College of Osteopathic Medicine, Michigan State University–East Lansing. He has built a four-year medical school curriculum that integrates EBM, biostatistics, research methods, and journal clubs. He also serves as a peer reviewer for Osteopathic Family Physician.

Amy Blevins is the associate director for public services at the Ruth Lilly Medical Library, Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM)–Indianapolis. She is also the IUSM thread director for EBM and oversees a team of librarians teaching EBM and critical appraisal to medical students at IUSM. She has worked on fourteen published systematic reviews and coedited Curriculum-Based Library Instruction: From Cultivating Faculty Relationships to Assessment.

July 11

Getting Started with Interprofessional Education at Your Institution

Develop the skills and knowledge that enable you to become involved with interprofessional education at your institution. Learn how to plan for success with an interprofessional education roadmap that addresses the core areas of librarian integration into interprofessional education—academic, clinical, and community engagement—and create an individualized action plan for interprofessional education involvement at your institution.

Rebecca Carlson McCall, AHIP, is a clinical librarian at the Health Sciences Library, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, and serves on the university’s Interprofessional Education and Practice (IPEP) Steering Committee. She is also a co-convener of the MLA Interprofessional Education Special Interest Group.

Jamie Conklin is the Nursing Liaison Librarian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and serves on the university's Interprofessional Education and Practice (IPEP) Steering Committee. Jamie is focused on opportunities for the library in helping to promote IPE academic scholarship and curricula. She is a co-convener of the MLA Interprofessional Education SIG.

August and September

Troubleshooting Systematic Reviews

Margaret Foster, AHIP, and Sarah Jewell, who presented three powerful and very well-reviewed systematic review webinars in 2018, are back in 2019 with two new systematic review webinars. These webinars are primarily for librarians who are new to systematic reviews and those who are hoping to start a systematic review service. Experienced searchers may glean nuggets of wisdom. Each part is self-contained.

Margaret Foster, AHIP, is an associate professor at Texas A&M University–College Station and serves as the systematic reviews coordinator at the Medical Sciences Library. She has published 20 articles applying or describing systematic review methods and evidence-based practices and has developed a popular continuing education course on systematic reviews that has trained over 300 librarians.

Sarah T. Jewell is an information and education librarian for Rutgers University Libraries, Newark, NJ. She has been conducting systematic reviews since 2010 and has helped launch or refine systematic review services at two institutions.

August 7

Troubleshooting Systematic Reviews: Refining the Research Question

How do you determine the feasibility of a systematic review and identify research gaps worthy of study? How do you know when a scoping review is appropriate? How can you help researchers refine their questions? Join Margaret Foster, AHIP, and Sarah Jewell as they answer these questions and others by exploring actual research scenarios.

September 5

Troubleshooting Systematic Reviews: Refining the Search

Join Margaret Foster, AHIP, and Sarah Jewell as they show you how to revise and refine a search based on researcher feedback, ensure you are capturing articles that meet eligibility criteria, and troubleshoot a search that is failing to retrieve known articles significant to the topic.

October and November

Grey (Literature) Matters

Join Sarah Bonato for a two-part series on grey (literature) matters. The October webinar is for all librarians and information professionals who are interested in learning more about grey literature. The November webinar is for information professionals and librarians who have searching experience or who do systematic reviews, scoping reviews, and other complex reviews.

Sarah Bonato is the lead reference/research librarian at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, ON, Canada, coauthor of a number of systematic reviews and guidelines in behavioral health, and the author of Searching the Grey Literature: A Handbook for Searching Reports, Working Papers, and Other Unpublished Research.

October 2

Grey Matters: Selecting the Right Grey Literature to Search

This webinar introduces you to the many types of grey literature and how to determine which type of grey literature to search to meet a request. You will get insights into questions to ask researchers, decision aids, data saturation, and how to develop a search plan and set a search scope for including unpublished research, clinical trials, grey data, reports, government documents, and other types of grey literature.

November 6

Grey Matters: Structuring Your Google Search

Structured Google searching and Google-powered search tools can identify literature that other search tools miss, but there are significant challenges to designing and carrying these searches. This webinar provides an overview of structured Google searching using Google-powered search tools, such as Google Custom Search Engines and Google Scholar, and alternative search engines, such as DuckDuckGo, Million Short, WolframAlpha.

December 11

Research by the Numbers: Measuring and Increasing Impact

Join scholars from the Taubman Health Sciences Library in exploring publication metrics used to quantify the impact of individual researchers, research groups, and journals and the latest tools that provide citation-based indicators and visualizations. You will learn the strengths and weaknesses of each metric, how to teach authors ways to maximize the impact of their work, and gain insights from a new research impact initiative at Taubman.

Tyler Nix and Judith E. Smith are informationists at the Taubman Health Sciences Library, University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, and coleaders of the Taubman Research Impact Core. In the latter role, they partner with health sciences faculty, staff, and students in projects related to tracking and communicating the impact of research outputs.

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This information is accurate as of February 2019. MLA reserves the right to alter topics, content, and scheduling.