Karly Vesely, MLIS is a medical librarian at MacNeal Hospital in Berwyn, Illinois and one of the three winners of the Syed Maghrabi Scholarship for 2010.
The HSLI Annual Conference, Building Partnerships: Pathways to Library Opportunities, was my first conference experience as an Illinois librarian, and I definitely enjoyed it! Wisconsin has been my home state for the majority of my life, and I’ve only recently moved to the Chicagoland area. While I’ve been able to interact with a number of the local librarians via phone and email, I was really looking forward to meeting them face-to-face and getting to know them better, and the conference proved an excellent way to do so!
I arrived at the conference on Thursday morning, just in time for a quick bite of breakfast and a bit of mingling before we got started with the day’s continuing education courses. Of course, everyone was very friendly and welcoming, so I immediately felt at ease! After breakfast, I headed to my first course of the day, Knowledge Sharing, with Lorri Zipperer. In this course, I learned more about the importance of harvesting and sharing knowledge between different departments of a hospital (or other organization), and what a librarian can do to help with this. I became more aware of the fact that sometimes it may be more beneficial and helpful to connect people with each other, rather than resources. After lunch, it was time for my second course of the day, Electronic Collection Development Planning, with Joy Kennedy and Pam Sherwill-Navarro. This was the course I had been most interested in, and it did not disappoint. It provided a nice overview of electronic collection development, and it was also very helpful to hear my colleagues various views on different aspects of this process. All in all, I found the continuing education courses I participated in to be worthwhile and informative!
In the evening, Nancy’s Reception served as a great opportunity for me to introduce myself to more of my colleagues. Various vendors were there, with their wares on display, so I explored some the library products and resources that I was not already familiar with. However, I was especially impressed with the posters being presented by some of the librarians! They were all clearly very excited about their research, and I enjoyed learning about their various initiatives and successes. Given that my institution has a family medicine residency, I was particularly interested in Fran Kovach’s poster, Family Physicians Inquiries Network (FPIN) Consortium Scholarly Publishing Opportunities for Expert Searchers, and she happily discussed it with me. Of course, the reception also included some delicious food and a number of door prizes!
On Friday, roundtable discussions of partnerships started out the day. Attendees were able to participate in two roundtable discussions, and I joined the Librarians and Nursesdiscussion, followed by Librarians and Physicians. Both discussion groups had lively participation, and it was a great opportunity for me to take in different ideas and perspectives. We then had a wonderful presentation from keynote speaker Amy Glenn Vega, titled Building Partnerships. She demonstrated the power that stories can have when working with others, as opposed to just using numbers and figures to get your point across. Finally, the day was ended with GMR updates, as well as the business meeting, where we reviewed the past year and discussed projects and plans for the upcoming one.
In the end, I heartily enjoyed my first conference experience as an Illinois medical librarian! I would like to thank the officers and members of HSLI for your warm welcome and helpful programming! I greatly appreciated the opportunity to learn as much as I could from my colleagues in the field of health sciences librarianship, and I look forward to next year’s conference!