I want to thank the scholarship committee for choosing me as one of the recipients of the Syed Maghrabi Scholarship. This enabled me to attend the meeting with less financial worries. The educational funds through my hospital are a lot harder to come by, as I’m sure everyone is aware and experiencing.
Of immediate use to me for my job was the Supporting Systematic Reviews workshop by Janis Glover. After this CE, I had more confidence in my training skills, and used better examples and terminology.
When I returned to work I had a training session scheduled with a Family Medicine resident to work on his Help Desk Answer for FPIN which went well. Last year I changed from group training classes for Evidence Based searching to one-on-one (or two) sessions. This way I can work with each person on their specific question, and tailor the class to their skill level. The training is more useful and timely than having it all at the beginning of the year, which results in the possibility that they’ll forget everything by the time they are assigned a time slot in their schedule to work on research. While the class was aimed at involving librarians in the systematic review process, I felt I got a lot out of it to improve my teaching skills.
Working on the planning committee to organize this meeting was an almost 2 year adventure. Usually HSLI meetings take only a year to plan, but this being the regional meeting with the Midwest Chapter it involved much more detail and advance planning to make everything run smoothly. I thought our monthly phone conference call meetings were informative as well as set the stage for what each person/subcommittee needed to accomplish in the next time period. I think the networking between librarians went extremely smoothly with everyone pitching in as needed. Anticipating and planning for problems resulted in a higher comfort level as we approached the actual meeting. I would recommend as many people as possible get involved with planning HSLI meetings each year, you’ll learn a lot about the organization as well as working with others, and the more people involved means the less work each has to achieve, because most of us are being challenged with more to do.
Overall, the CEs I attended were very good, meeting all the speakers and poster presenter inspired creative thoughts, the vendors were informative as usual, and I enjoyed the whole experience.
Linda Feinberg, MSLS – Director
NorthShore Libraries