Proceedings, One Hundredth Annual Meeting, Medical Library Association, Inc. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada May 5–11, 2000

The Medical Library Association, Inc. (MLA), held its One Hundredth Annual Meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, May 5–11, 2000, at the Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Centre. The meeting was held jointly with the Canadian Health Libraries Association/Association des bibliothèques de la santé du Canada (CHLA/ABSC). The daily newsletter, ROAR, provided highlights of daily activities and reports of activities of the previous day; four conference issues were published, Sunday, May 6–Wednesday, May 10. Total meeting attendance was 2,292.

PRECONFERENCE ACTIVITIES

The MLA Executive Committee met in the morning and early afternoon on Wednesday, May 3. The MLA Board of Directors held a business and planning meeting beginning Wednesday afternoon, May 3, and continuing through Thursday and Friday, May 4–5. The CHLA/ABSC Board of Directors met throughout the days of Friday and Saturday, May 5–6. The MLA Credentialing Committee met during the evening of May 5.

On Saturday, May 6, the following national committees met: the Books Panel, Credentialing Committee, the 2000, 2001, and 2002 National Program Committees, and the Nominating Committee. In addition, the Chapter Council and Section Council held meetings. A Hospitality Center staffed by the Local Assistance Committee (LAC) was open for a total of fifty-four hours, starting Thursday, May 4, to aid conference attendees with information about Vancouver restaurants, shopping, transportation, and tourist attractions. The Placement Service was open for a total of thirty hours, beginning Sunday, May 7.

The Friends of LIS Group met Saturday morning and the SIRSI Hyperion Digital Media Archive Seminar was held Saturday afternoon.

Late Saturday afternoon, May 6, an orientation session and tea were held for new MLA leaders; orientation sessions were also held for chapter and section chairs.

That evening saw the opening of the Hall of Exhibits with a Welcome Reception for all attendees. Exhibits were open through Tuesday afternoon, May 9.

CONTINUING EDUCATION COURSES

The 1999/2000 Continuing Education Committee offered the following courses on May 5, 6, and 10:

CE 110, The Joint Commission Standards: Management of Information and Beyond

CE 131, Understanding and Using Medical Terminology

CE 132, Applying Copyright Law in Libraries

CE 200, Management for Solo Librarians … and Others

CE 231, Chicken Soup and Crawdad Gumbo: Ethnic Awareness and Health Information Resources

CE 242, Planning and Managing the Consumer Health Library

CE 243, Benchmarking in a High-Tech Competitive Environment

CE 254, Psycho-social Aspects of Providing Consumer Health Information

CE 265, Teaching Quality Filtering of Web Sites

CE 300, Nursing Information Access: Library Services for the Nursing Profession

CE 312, Business Resources for Health Sciences Librarians and Information Professionals

CE 321, Introduction to Bioethics and Bioethics Resources

CE 332, The Allied Health Professions: Information Issues and Resources

CE 333, Introduction to Reference in the Health Sciences

CE 344, Net Explorations: Finding the Internet Evidence

CE 365, Finding and Using Health Statistics Results

CE 366, NLM's Pubmed, Clinical Trials Database, and the Next Generation Gateway

CE 400, Licensing and Managing Electronic Resources

CE 401, The History of the Health Sciences: A One-Day Overview

CE 500, Building and Managing Your Digital Library

CE 501, The ABCs of Intranet Development

CE 532, Planning Your Library's Internet Presence Through Strategic Goals and Objectives

CE 533, The Second Generation Medical Intranet

CE 564, Library Web Site Architecture and Design

CE 600, Critically Appraising the Gold: Evaluating Clinical Studies

CE 601, Technology Tips to Enhance Electronic Presentations

CE 633, Evidence-based Medicine for Librarians: Panning for Gold

CE 731, Making a Difference Through Outreach

CE 732, Understanding Study Design and Statistical Concepts in Clinical Research

CE 743, Applied Quantitative Methods

CE 754, Research Design and Data Collection

Two conference symposia were also offered:

Out of the Mist, Into the Millennium: A Symposium on Alternative and Complementary Health Care Information: sponsored by MLA's Chiropractic Libraries Section and by MANTIS—Manual Alternative and Natural Therapy Index System, held on Saturday afternoon, May 6.

Dragon by the Tail: The Myth and Reality of Electronic Journals: sponsored by the Collection Development, Medical School Libraries, and Technical Services Sections, and in part by Academic Press, EBSCO Information Services, Elsevier Science, HARRASSOWITZ, ISI, Ovid Technologies, RoweCom, SilverPlatter Information, Swets Blackwell, and John Wiley & Sons, held Wednesday afternoon and evening, May 10.

The 27 preconference courses, 4 postconference courses, and 2 symposia had a total registration of 903.

CONFERENCE, MAY 7

Early Sunday, May 7, the MLA Mentoring Program Task Force met, the Placement Service held an orientation, and a reception was held for new members. The following MLA sections held business meetings: Chiropractic Libraries, Collection Development, Dental, Educational Media and Technologies, International Cooperation, Medical Society Libraries, Pharmacy and Drug Information, Public Services, Relevant Issues, and Research. A breakfast reception was held for CHLA/ABSC members.

Meeting welcome

The opening session was convened by MLA President Frieda O. Weise, who welcomed members to the meeting. Welcoming remarks were also made by: Liz Bayley, president of CHLA/ABSC; Adrean Berger of the Pacific Northwest Chapter; Elizabeth Husem, past-president of the European Association for Health Information and Libraries (EAHIL); Brett A. Kirkpatrick, 2000 National Program Committee; and Jim Henderson, chair of the 2000 Local Assistance Committee. President Weise then recognized the many organizations that provided financial and in-kind contributions to the meeting.

Brett Kirkpatrick then formally introduced MLA President Frieda Weise, who gave her presidential address, entitled “Renewing Our Commitment: A Golden Year and a Golden Future.”

Presidential address

Frieda Weise: Good morning and welcome again to the first joint meeting of the Medical Library Association (MLA) and the Canadian Health Libraries Association/Association des bibliothèques de la santè du Canada (CHLA/ABSC), and the 100th annual meeting of MLA. I am very pleased to stand before you today and tell you that MLA is strong, is moving programs forward to benefit its members, and is helping to assure that our profession has a golden future. Not that we do not have challenges, but more about that later!

This has been a special year for me as president of MLA, as well as a special year for MLA—a golden year, you might say. It has been special for me in that I was able to work with colleagues from across the organization and from across the country. Working with the Board of Directors has indeed been a pleasure. What a wonderful group of people! They are responsible, thoughtful, intelligent; have great senses of humor; and behave in the most civil manner even when there are differences of opinion. It has really been a treat working with all of them. It has been special for MLA in that it was the first year of MLA's second one hundred years. We are off to a good start.

Headquarters staff is quite transparent to most members, I would suspect. As members, we rarely come into contact with headquarters problems such as vacancies or a tight deadline. And we should not. I feel I should say a few words about this staff, however, since this past year I have been rather more intimately involved with headquarters. In spite of several major vacancies—including the resignations of our annual meeting planner, our publications manager, and our systems manager—there was no degradation in services or progress on our objectives and priorities for this year. I want to thank headquarters staff personally for a job well done and especially our Executive Director Carla Funk in juggling the balls so successfully.

Now, of course, MLA is not just the Board of Directors and the headquarters staff. It is all of you out there—the committee members, task forces, and section leaders and committees and chapters as well, who really work to carry out the programs of MLA. You are a special group of volunteers, all several hundred of you. Hats off to you all—the board, headquarters, and the army of volunteers who make this organization great!

As you may recall, the theme for my year as president was “Renewing Our Commitment” to the values that have served us well and to look to the future as we start our second century. I had a rather long list of priorities. One of the first things I learned as president, however, is that it takes longer than a year to complete most of them. (So I looked into running for a second term, but that required a bylaw change, so I dropped that idea.) I am sure every president feels these pangs of regret at not seeing everything through to completion, but I am confident that our next president will see them through along with his goals and objectives; and he will no doubt feel the same way about his priorities at the end of his term.

Now, you might ask—what did we accomplish this past year? What sprang to my mind immediately as I was preparing this talk were those dreadful essays we used to have to write in school: “how I spent my summer vacation.” Then I saw this terrific Cathy cartoon that I thought was at least somewhat relevant to this kind of endeavor.

(Cell 1): “How We Spent the Last Summer of the 20th Century”

(Cell 2): Using the ten-zillion-dollar personal communications industry to alienate all humans within earshot (Cathy is saying “so anyway, Randy's fake tan was so blotchy and ….”)

(Cell 3): Staying up into the wee hours buying books (Cathy is saying “Read?? Who has time to read?? I acquire!”)

(Cell 4): Trying to figure out what happened (Cathy's friend says “What happened to summer?” Cathy says “I don't know, I can't get the calendar to pop up on my organizer.”)

Sometimes, that is how I feel about the past year—what happened to it? It just sped by.

Seriously though, I do want to report on several specific projects and progress in MLA's areas of priority. For a more thorough report, please see the Year in Review, which you all received in your registration packet. Take a good look—this shows your MLA at work for you!

As you know, MLA has a Strategic Plan, upon which the president's priorities are based. The priorities are approved by the Board of Directors—and then things start to happen. Not only must assignments be made, task forces formed, but also new initiatives must be funded. I was fortunate to have my proposed priorities approved and funded largely due to a healthy stock market! The broad goals of the MLA Strategic Plan encompass six areas:

1. Professional Development

2. Advocacy

3. Organization

4. Research

5. National Information Policy

6. Information Technology

I will describe accomplishments in each area briefly.

Professional Development

Continuing education

The MLA professional development program has long been outstanding, and I am pleased to say that it is brimming with vitality! Witness the thirty-one courses presented at this meeting, along with two symposia entitled: “Out of the Mist, Into the Millennium: A Symposium on Alternative and Complementary Health Care Information” and “Dragon by the Tail: The Myth and Reality of Electronic Journals.” Additionally, the Continuing Education (CE) Committee had its creative juices flowing this year and is working on developing areas of specialization or clusters of courses revolving around particular topics. The first will be a consumer health certificate program, which will debut in 2001. Also based on the first Web-based course, “Evidence-Based Medicine and the Medical Librarian,” which was presented twice this past year, the CE Committee is planning a multi-level, distance-learning program on electronic publishing and is seeking to increase the number of Web-based courses. As you can see, this committee is actively working to meet members needs.

Credentialing

The Academy of Health Information Professionals has streamlined the application process, and we now have 1,328 members in the academy, around 36% of our members. I encourage all of you to seek membership and encourage employers to support the academy by encouraging their staff to participate in professional activities, by supporting continuing education, and by considering it a requirement for hiring. You may be interested in the fact that other library associations are studying our credentialing program as they seek to develop their own. We are a good model.

Mentoring

You may recall that a mentoring task force was put in place last year. The task force will complete its work in 2000. Their progress to date is impressive, and I am looking forward to their program recommendations next year.

Advocacy

Advocacy for our profession is key to the mission of MLA. Sometimes advocacy brings tangible results, like the poster in your registration packet, “On Site, Online, and On Top of the Latest Information,” and sometimes intangible, such as awareness by the public regarding the role of medical librarians in evaluating health information on the Web. Members of the board, as well as other librarians, were interviewed by the print, radio, TV, and online media. For example:

1. A multi-spread page in the July 14 USA Today, titled: “Special Report: The Internet Changes Medicine” included interviews with myself, M. J. Tooey, and Janice Kelly, and the headline “Guidelines, Libraries Offer Cures for Web Confusion.”

2. The Chicago Tribune used MLA-recommended Websites in several stories.

3. WRAL-TV (CBS) in Raleigh, North Carolina, interviewed Pat Thibodeau from Duke University.

PCI, our public relations firm, has orchestrated these publicity efforts.

This year, we also have several tangible results to share with you. First, MLA successfully negotiated a discount from MD Consult for institutional members. Almost 100 institutions took advantage of this offer. Second, to promote the value of the hospital librarian and library administrators, a focus group of hospital librarians was held last fall in Chicago to discover what types of materials could be developed by MLA. The poster was a result of this focus group. A second focus group will convene at this meeting to further the discussion and make additional recommendations. What we learned in the first focus group was that hospital librarians preferred to have materials developed that they could use.

Third, a stronger emphasis has been placed on research for the profession—research that will provide useful information for librarians in promoting their role and in receiving fair compensation. I will describe two studies briefly when I discuss the research area.

Fourth, MLA staff has worked with NLM staff to fund two minority scholarships for $5,000 each. The first scholarship will be funded through the ALA Spectrum Initiative, and NLM and MLA will jointly sponsor one Spectrum scholar. The Spectrum program strives to bring diversity to the library profession by providing scholarships to minority students to attend graduate schools of library and information science. MLA's Scholarship for Minority Students will be increased to up to $5,000 (as will the MLA Scholarship) to recognize today's costs of education. This is part of a larger recruitment plan to encourage students from diverse backgrounds to enter health sciences librarianship.

Organization

Self-evaluation

Have you ever been to a meeting where the meat of the agenda was last? You wonder why you are there. A sign of an efficient organization is that it does not spend more time on organizational issues (things like headquarters staffing) than it does on programmatic issues. I am very pleased to say that our Board of Directors spends the majority of its time discussing issues important to the MLA or the profession and making decisions about them. This year, in fact, we conducted a board evaluation with the help of the American Society of Association Executives. The evaluation revealed that we are an effective group. We deal with the issues and do not get bogged down with minutia. Credit goes to both headquarters and the board members to keep it that way.

Staffing

As I mentioned earlier, most of us are not concerned with details of running the MLA headquarters, but I want to mention that this year several important changes took place. First, we have a new copublisher, Neal-Schuman; second, we have a new meeting planner, Hall-Erickson, Inc.; and third, a person at headquarters has been given the responsibility to oversee and assist with research activities conducted or supported by MLA as we expand that role.

Logo

Has anyone noticed we have a new logo? No new name, as we heard that message last year, but a new logo, which is now on our publications, the Bulletin and the News, and letterhead. I think it reflects us well as a streamlined and effective organization and I think the tagline—an association of health information professionals—helps to describe who we are.

Research

Research provides the information and knowledge that is the underpinning of our profession, but research is an expensive proposition for an organization our size. This year, we were fortunate to have three research projects underway.

First, the Hay study, a study to assess the accountabilities and compensation of medical library professionals in information technology roles and comparing these to information technology professionals in health care institutions. Results of this study will be presented at Business Meeting I today by a member of the Hay staff. I want to thank all those that participated. We had a terrific 33% return rate (179 returned from both hospital and academic libraries). During the next few months, we will publish the data on the members only Website and look at ways to tailor the information to assist you in your own setting. I think it was a worthwhile and important study—one that other library organizations are very interested in.

Second, a study on the value of information services to the bottom line of the organization and how best to present this data to administrators will be conducted. It covers both academic and hospital settings. The study is based on a Request for Proposal developed by MLA and will be awarded after the annual meeting to be completed in a year and a half. I very much look forward to the results of this study to add to the growing body of literature regarding the value of information services to the organization, to patient care, and, ultimately, to the bottom line.

And third, the benchmarking project being conducted by a large number of volunteers with support by headquarters on MLANET. The project is currently in beta test; you can hear more about it at the open forum on Monday. Basically, the project is to provide baseline date useful to our hospital libraries.

The board will also, this coming year, be looking at the final report of the Research Policy Implementation Task Force on how to support research.

Research data is extremely important to our profession in this rapidly changing environment. I encourage all of you both to support MLA's efforts and to carry out your own whenever possible.

National Information Policy

Will the copyright issues ever be resolved? What is happening in database protection legislation? How will these laws affect our libraries and their ability to carry out their mission? Will Medicare reform help or hurt our libraries? These and other questions are what the Governmental Relations Committee and the joint MLA/AAHSL Legislative Task Force ponder and track. This year visits were made to Capitol Hill staff of the Senate and House Labor, Health, Human Services, Education and related subcommittees to address issues regarding database legislation, NLM appropriations, distance education and copyright, consumer health information, Medicare reform, and graduate medical education. MLA also supported SPARC and the Shared Legal Coalition; the Governmental Relations Committee prepared a white paper on electronic publishing, which is now on MLANET. MLA also endorsed joint library association testimony and signed onto letters and statements on issues related to the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA). This is a state issue, which I hope you will all monitor in your own state. And finally, we presented the 2000 MLA Distinguished Public Service Award to Representative Rick Boucher (D-VA) in April for his efforts to support balanced digital copyright legislation.

Information Technology

Changes in information technology are keeping us running, sometimes only in place! MLA is committed to a superior Web presence through MLANET and continues to improve it by adding new information. The newly formed MLANET Editorial Board this year developed policies and procedures for MLANET. And I am sure it will entertain suggestions for improvement from members. The members only portion of MLANET debuted in February, containing the online Members Directory, salary survey information, and benchmarking data. No doubt there will be continuing controversy about what to make freely available and what to make members only, what to make available to personal or to institutional members. Remember, though, that nothing is free and that someone has to pay for MLANET and the services it offers.

As you can see, it has been a busy year. Additionally, the following task forces, which have two-year time frames, have been hard at work—mentoring, publications, and the Cunningham fellowship. We have also been active in the international arena—hosting Timothy Shola Abolarinwa from Nigeria, contributing to the ICML for scholarships for medical librarians from developing countries to attend the International Congress on Medical Librarianship in London, and, through the International Cooperation Section, beginning a Sister Library Initiative with a library in Latvia.

In mulling over the past year, I reflected upon the sense of urgency about our profession and where it is headed that I expressed to you last year. Is the profession really in danger of dying or have we successfully made it through that “golden hour?” As you may know, the golden hour principle in trauma refers to that first hour in treatment of a severely injured patient. Chances are good that the patient will survive with rapid, appropriate resuscitation during that first hour. (By the way, this term was first used in 1963 by R. Adams Crowley from the University of Maryland, who developed the model for trauma systems.)

That golden, precious hour is very short, but as I said when I began, I believe MLA and the profession are strong and in good health. I think we have survived that golden hour. What do I base this on? On the strength of this program here at the annual meeting, on the articles published in the Bulletin, on the programs I was fortunate to learn from at the chapter meetings I attended this year, and on the accomplishments of MLA this past year. Can we sit back and relax now? I guess you know the answer to that—no. We have to continue to build on our accomplishments and not let down our guard. I do not have to tell you that we face challenges to our role as information providers, organizers, educators, and leaders in our institutions.

In 1987, the MLA published Challenge to Action: Planning and Evaluation Guidelines for Academic Health Sciences Libraries [1]. I decided to look at this document again after the board had a discussion about the role of the academic health sciences library in the academic medical center, and I discovered that this document is still viable in that it describes “partnership” roles for the library that are relevant today. With a little editing, they are relevant not only to academic libraries, but hospital libraries as well. For example:

• The institution's strategic planning activities for the management of (academic) information resources and activities must include senior library management, as a full partner with other units in the institution.

• The library and the computer center should participate in management and planning efforts toward coordinating the acquisition and use of the institution's computer and communications resources.

• The library should be instrumental in the institution's plan to integrate computing and non-print learning resources into the curriculum; it also must assume a broader role in assisting students, faculty, and practitioners to master basic skills in information handling.

• The library can offer substantial support to researchers by using new technologies to organize, synthesize, and filter scholarly information.

• The library can contribute to patient care cost-containment efforts by providing rapid access to information at such critical points of need as the laboratory, office, or patient's bedside.

• The library, with a tradition of outreach and community service, is a ready-made partner to strengthen community ties (of the academic health sciences center) through its information support services to community agencies and consumers.

These guidelines probably ring a bell with you. Even though they were developed more than ten years ago—before electronic journals were much of a threat to our existence, before the Web, and before e-commerce—they have remarkable relevance. And our budgets were probably still pretty good back then, too!

These guidelines show us that we have the ability and foresight to look ahead, but our job is not done. We must still take every opportunity to emphasize the role of the librarian, or, if you prefer, the health information professional, in being the primary purveyor of knowledge and information in this digital era. We must constantly make sure that we do not become marginalized. I am reminded of the quote from John Greenleaf Whittier, hackneyed though it may be: “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest of these: ‘It might have been!’”

As professionals, we must support a strong MLA, one that continues to foster professional development; influence legislation in our favor; promote the role and value of the librarian in any type of information-related endeavor, whether this is in a traditional library or an Internet business; and foster and conduct research to build a strong knowledgebase for our profession.

This is a tall order! I was so pleased that our budget for Fiscal Year 2000 is balanced—thanks to the dues increase that you approved and lower headquarters expenses. Our dues now contribute 25% of the total budget, which seems a reasonable percentage. Let us keep in mind, however, that we are an association—we are not Wal-Mart. And I do not mean this in any flippant way—an association is a group of people who voluntarily come together to solve common problems, meet common needs, and accomplish common goals. I go back to Henry Ford who is credited with saying—coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.

So, while we have survived the golden hour, I have had a golden year; we must still work for that golden future.

Last summer, I had the good fortune to vacation in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. What beautiful places and what lovely, generous people! In Newfoundland, we were told a story that I thought appropriate to share with you. There was a minister who was surveying churches across Canada starting in Vancouver. The first church he entered had a telephone booth with a golden telephone—calls to heaven cost $10,000. He encountered the same situation all across the land from Yellow Knife to Churchill to Montreal to Halifax. In Newfoundland, however, he found that the call to heaven on the golden telephone was only a dollar. “How can that be?” he asked. “Well,” he was told, “you know, in Newfoundland, it is only a local call to heaven.”

I am going to stop here, and I am sure my time has run out. I want to thank all those who have steadfastly supported me this past year, my husband, my cats, my administrative and library staff, MLA headquarters, the board, and the host of volunteers. Special thanks to Kay Kazinski for this production and to M. J. for assisting me. Thank you all for a wonderful year as president and have a fabulous time at this historic 100th annual meeting in Vancouver.

References

1. Love E, ed. Challenge to action: planning and evolution guidelines for academic health sciences libraries. Chicago, IL: Joint Task Force of the Association of Academic Health Sciences Library Directors and the Medical Library Association, 1987:v–vi.

Plenary Session I: The John P. McGovern Lecture: Digital Doctoring: Health Online and the Empowered Medical Consumer

Introduction: Carole M. Gilbert, Helen L. DeRoy Medical Library, Providence Hospital and Medical Centers, Southfield, Michigan.

Speaker: Tom Ferguson, M.D., Health Informatics, University of Texas Health Science Center, Houston.

After the first Plenary Session, Chapter Council sponsored roundtable discussions for chapter members to informally share experiences and expertise over lunch. Discussion groups concentrated on the following topics: annual meeting planning, archives, benchmarking, bylaws, chairs/incoming chairs, communications/newsletters, computer security, consumer health information services, continuing education, electronic journals, finance and chapter treasurers, governmental relations, Internet in libraries, intranets and libraries, marketing the library, membership and recruiting, professional growth and development/Academy of Health Information Professionals, research, and Web managers.

Business session I

The first business session was convened by President Frieda Weise. She introduced Carla Funk, executive director of MLA, who introduced the members of the 1999–2000 Board of Directors, the parliamentarian, the sergeant-at-arms, and the following appointed officers: T. Scott Plutchak, editor of the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, Beverly Murphy, editor of the MLA News, and Scott Garrison, MLANET editor. She also recognized outgoing editors, J. Michael Homan, Jean Demas, and Beryl Glitz. She asked chapter chairs, section chairs, and SIG convenors to stand to be recognized, then committee chairs and MLA representatives.

Ms. Weise returned to the podium and read the names of association members who had died during the past year: Patricia Y. Arter, Virginia Parker Dillon, Don Hawryliuk, Anne F. Lippman, Jean Miller, Antonija Prelec, and Joan Staats. She called for a moment of silence in honor of their honor.

Ms. Weise announced the publication of four new monographs during the past year: Handbook on Problem-Based Learning, edited by Jocelyn A. Rankin, Ph.D.; Health Sciences Environment and Librarianship in Health Sciences Libraries, edited by Lucretia W. McClure; Drug Information: A Guide to Current Resources, second edition, by Bonnie Snow; and Guardians of Medical Knowledge: The Genesis of the Medical Library Association, by Jennifer Connor. She then announced the production of two new BibKits: History of the Health Sciences, by Stephanie J. Greenberg, Ph.D., and Patricia E. Gallagher; and A Guide to Information Resources for Telemedicine by Nancy A. Brown; and one new DocKit: Marketing the Consumer Health Information Service, by Kay McCall.

After verifying with the sergeant-at-arms that a quorum was present at the meeting, she called on MLA Secretary Diane Schwartz to move adoption of the Rules of the Assembly.

Diane Schwartz: The Rules of the Assembly include information on addressing the chair, presenting motions, debating, and voting. These rules are printed on page 49 of the Official Program. At the direction of the Board of Directors, I move that the Rules of the Assembly as printed in the 2000 Official Program be adopted.

President Weise, hearing no discussion, called the question, and the motion was passed.

Diane Schwartz: A printed copy of the Official Program as proposed by the Board of Directors is in the hands of each registrant for this meeting. The agenda for the 2000 business meetings are found on pages 30 and 35 of the Official Program. By direction of the Board of Directors, I move that the agenda for the 2000 business meetings of the Medical Library Association be adopted.

President Weise, again hearing no discussion, called the question, and the motion was passed.

Frieda Weise: In January 2000, ballots for MLA's election of 2000/2001 officers, Board of Directors, and Nominating Committee members were mailed to 4,386 voting members of the Medical Library Association. A total of 1,570 ballots were returned. The Ad Hoc Election Task Force, chaired by Patricia E. Pinkowski, counted the ballots at MLA headquarters on January 6, 2000. The election results were announced in the February issue of the MLA News, and complete election results, including vote totals, are published in the Nominating Committee's report in the 1999/2000 Annual Report available on MLANET. Following are the election results: Carol G. Jenkins, AHIP, was elected president-elect. Lynn M. Fortney, AHIP, and Mark E. Funk, AHIP, were elected for three-year terms to the Board of Directors. The following were elected to the Nominating Committee: Margaret (Peg) Allen, Margaret Bandy, JoAnne Borkman, Nancy W. Clemons, Nacy Bush Fazzone, Mary J. Jarvis, Elaine Russo Martin, Audrey Powderly Newcomer, and James Shedlock.

President Weise called on the MLA Treasurer, Suzanne Grefsheim, to present her report.

Suzanne Grefsheim: This report is about the difference a year makes. At last year's meeting, Treasurer Linda Watson reported a surplus for fiscal year 1998. This was attributed primarily to the excitement generated by the Centennial Celebration. In 1999, however, MLA spent more than it brought in in revenue. While this was planned, it did not bode well for subsequent years. Fortunately, members recognized this in time and passed a dues increase. Today, I will take you through a summary of the 1999 fiscal year, compare it to 1998, and speak a bit about what the future holds.

First, let us look at the 1999 fiscal year and see how it compares to 1998. At the end of the fiscal year (December 31), the association's operating budget showed revenues of $2,486,479 and expenses of $2,672,027, a difference of $185,548. Revenues declined by more than $81,000, or 3%. This is understandable when one considers that 1998 was the centennial year, and revenue was much higher as a result of this once-in-a-century event. However, expenses in 1999 also were higher by almost 4%. The board anticipated most of this difference when it approved the 1999 Business Plan. Transfers of $87,000 from the Association Stabilization (Reserve) Fund and $62,289 from the Shaping Our Future Fund were budgeted to upgrade MLANET and fund several new initiatives. However, this is deficit spending, no matter how you look at it. Fortunately, surpluses from previous years and a healthy stock market have inflated our reserve fund in recent years. At the end of 1999, almost $900,000 was in the fund.

A complete statement of financial activities comparing 1999 and 1998 appears in the treasurer's annual report, which is available on MLANET, or you can request a paper copy from headquarters.

If you have read the most recent issue of the MLA News, you know that a balanced budget is proposed for 2000—no borrowing from reserves this year. And, if the efforts of the 2000 National Program Committee (NPC) are any indication, this should be a successful year financially. The 2000 NPC raised a record $87,000 from sponsors of this meeting. Frieda identified them individually this morning, and you will find a list in your registration packet as well. Please take time during the meeting to stop by their booths, learn more about their products and services, and thank them.

Now for what lies ahead. While last year tapping reserves allowed us to achieve the things Frieda enumerated this morning, and this year a dues increase gives us a balanced budget, neither strategy is something an association wants to repeat too often. So how can we maintain a balanced budget and keep dues low while continuing to anticipate rather than respond to member and professional needs? That is the question the board will be grappling with in the coming year. To find the answer, I think we will have to ask and answer some fundamental questions about what membership in MLA means, such as what kind of an association do we want to be? What kind of products and services will we offer members? Are these products and services actually producing the outcomes we intend? Are additions or cuts warranted? And, finally, we need to do a better job of explaining the value of membership to all of you.

The board cannot do this alone. It will need the input and involvement of the real stakeholders in the success of this association—all of you. And involvement means engaging in dialogue with us to understand what can and should be done. Working together—board, headquarters and members—we will assure MLA remains strong and vital.

I cannot conclude this report without thanking two people, Ray Naegele, MLA's director of financial and administrative services, and Carla Funk, executive director. Ray not only has guided my understanding of the association's finances, but he has been a collaborator and a trusted colleague. I have been most impressed with Carla's ability to shepherd association resources, both human and fiscal, to meet the demands of members in the most efficient and cost-effective manner. I am happy to report that I have been privileged to work with them and with a dynamic president and Board of Directors. Finally, thank you for this wonderful opportunity.

Ms. Weise then called on Carla Funk for her executive director's report. Ms. Funk spoke of turnover and changes in staff at headquarters and other MLA activities, and referred members to the formal headquarters report found on MLANET.

President Weise then asked that the annual reports of appointed officials, councils, committees, representatives, chapters, and sections, as available on MLANET, be received in a block. She called for corrections, amendments, or questions concerning the reports.

Wayne Peay: I guess this is a question that probably extends across multiple reports. My question is, when is MLA going to step up and commit to an electronic publisher?

Ms. Weise: In terms of the Bulletin, you mean?

Peay: In terms of both the Bulletin and its monographs.

Ms. Weise: As far as the Bulletin is concerned, it is coming up really soon. There are definitely plans in the works, and we have gotten information about the cost of doing it and so on and so forth, so I would expect that it is going to be happening within the year or so.

Wayne Peay: Or so?

Ms. Weise: Well, within a year. I do not personally know the exact time frame.

Wayne Peay: So, if I am understanding this, will we be able to discuss the comments and the results on the Internet for publishing?

Ms. Weise: That would be our hope. As far as monographs are concerned, I am not sure about that. Is there anybody who would like to respond?

Ruth Riley: Yesterday, we did commit to a pilot project to publish one of our monographs. I am not sure of the exact time line, but we have committed to one pilot project to get us started. And the panel has actually been discussing Web-based publication pretty actively for the past year and a half, so we are very aware of the issue, and I am looking at it very closely, and, hopefully, we will be able to report next year on the outcome of the pilot projects.

Ms. Weise: The question Wayne had was about whether we are committed to publishing our publications electronically, and we do know that the Bulletin is in the works, and we just heard from the Books Panel that it is looking to publish one of our monographs as a pilot project.

Rosalind Dudden: I am board liaison to the MLANET Editorial Board. There is a commitment, and it is in process, that the symposium that is taking place at the end to this meeting will be published as a electronic supplement to the Bulletin. I am not sure whether it's going to be with the October or January issue, but there will be a supplement.

Anne Prussing: The book that will come out next year, electronically, and my book is done as well, is the Ethnic Minority Health: a selected, annotated bibliography, by Craig Haynes. It is already available in print and it is our plan to make it available on the Web.

Ms. Weise then announced the annual reports would be accepted as presented. She then acknowledged all members of the Academy of Health Information Professionals: 337 senior members, 575 distinguished members, 300 members, and 65 provisional members—and asked those present to stand.

Ms. Weise then introduced Tom Mullin of the Hay Group to present the preliminary findings of the competency and compensation study commissioned by the board last year. Mr. Mullin presented his report and answered several questions from the members. The full report can be found on the members only area of MLANET at www.mlanet.org/members/hay_study/. With that, the business session was adjourned until Tuesday morning.

Section programming I

Eight program sessions were scheduled for the late afternoon on Sunday:

Chiropractic Libraries, Consumer and Patient Health Information, and International Cooperation Sections; and Complementary Medicine and Mental Health SIGs

Joint Contributed Papers Session: Calming the Dragon: The Mind-Body Connection in Healing

Moderator: Marcia M. Thomas, Ruth R. Cleveland Memorial Library, Cleveland Chiropractic College, Kansas City, Missouri.

And the Dragon Lived Happily Ever After…: Sharon Lezotte, McGoogan Library of Medicine, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha.

Embracing the Dragon: Alternative and Complementary Medicine Resources, Past, Present, and Future—the Public's Desire to Know and Its Impact upon the New York Academy of Medicine: Robert Lasner, New York Academy of Medicine, New York.

Coming Full-Circle: Mind-Body to Body-Mind: Dee Disardina, Health Sciences Library, Commission on Mental Health Services, Washington, DC.

Library Management and Leadership Section

Contributed Papers Session: Approaches to Organizational Change: Library Services in Health Systems Mergers

Moderator: M. Sandra Wood, Reference and Database Services, George T. Harrell Library, Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Pennsylvania State University, Hershey.

Responding to Health Care Reform and Regionalization: The Manitoba Health Information Network: Mark Rabnett, St. Boniface General Hospital, Winnipeg; and Tania Gottschalk and Ada M. Ducas, Neil John Maclean Health Sciences Library, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg.

Surviving a Merger: How Four Hospital Libraries Created a Unified System: Patricia Baldwin Regenberg, Assmann Health Sciences Library, Mountainside Hospital, Montclair, New Jersey; Mary K. Joyce, Lathrope Health Sciences Library, Morristown Memorial Hospital, Morristown, New Jersey; Kathleen A. Moeller, Library and CME Services, Robert Mulreany Health Sciences Library, Overlook Hospital, Summit, New Jersey; and Juliette Ratner, School of Nursing Library, Mountainside Hospital, Montclair, New Jersey.

Engineering Multi-Faceted Academic Hospital Library Collaboration in an Institutionally Competitive Environment: David W. Boilard, Raymon H. Mulford Library, Medical College of Ohio, Toledo; Suzanne Gale, Human Resources Learning Center, Flower Hospital, Sylvania, Ohio; and Carrie Lepow, Ph.D., Health Sciences Library, St. Vincent Hospital and Medical Center, Toledo, Ohio.

PennState-Geisinger Health System Merger/Demerger: The Long, Unwinding Road: Britain G. Roth, Academic Information, PennState Geisinger Health System, Danville, Pennsylvania.

Providing Library Services to an Expanding Health Care Enterprise: Management Challenges of a Dynamic Environment: Barbara A. Epstein, Administrative Services; Charles B. Wessel, Affiliated Hospital Services; and Patricia C. Mickelson, Falk Library of Health Science; Health Sciences Library System, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Medical Library Education Section

Special Contributed Papers Session for New Graduates and Current Students: Dragons Roar: New Perspectives

Moderator: Ellen Gay Detlefsen, D.L.S., School of Information Sciences and Center for Biomedical Informatics, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Comparing Credentialing Processes across Professional Associations: A Benchmarking Study: Shelley A. McKibbon and Martha C. Adamson, Libraries, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas.

An Examination of the Characteristics of Information Resources Preferred by Physicians: Lawrence (Lou) Duggan, School of Library and Information Studies, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Facing the Dragon: Metadata Issues for Medical Web Publishing: Andrea Hodgson, Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, London.

Linking to Consumer Health: How Academic Health Sciences Libraries Present Consumer Health Information on Their Web Pages: Caryn Scoville, J. Otto Lottes Health Sciences Library; and Erika De Leon, School of Information Science and Learning Technologies; University of Missouri, Columbia.

Stories of Experience: Informal Communication among Health Consumers: Robert F. Carey and Pamela J. McKenzie, Graduate Programme in Library and Information Science, Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, London.

The NLM and Alternative Medicine: The Long History of a Trend: Catherine Arnott Smith, Center for Biomedical Informatics and School of Information Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Herding Cats: Or the Challenges Faced in Training Health Sciences Librarians: MaryBeth Schell, Health Sciences Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Public Health/Health Administration, Collection Development, Research, and Technical Services Sections

Joint Contributed Papers Session: Tracking the Grey Literature: Capturing the Elusive Dragon, Tracking the Noncommercially Published Literature and Making It Available

Moderator: Laurie Isenberg, Reference and Instructional Technology, Archbishop Alemany Library, Dominican College, San Rafael, California.

Better Read than Dead: Breathing New Life into State Morbidity Data via the Internet: Kathryn E. Kerdolff, Health Sciences Center Library, Louisiana State University, New Orleans.

Shooting from the Hip or Target Practice? A Comparison of Conventional and Fugitive Search Results: Diane Helmer, Mary-Doug Wright, and Arminée Kazanjian, British Columbia Office of Health Technology Assessment, Vancouver.

The Grey Literature Report: Acquiring, Organizing, and Publicizing Fugitive Literature in Health Policy and Public Health: Marie Tomlinson Ascher, The New York Academy of Medicine, New York.

Set Your Sites on MSDS Providers: Hongjie Wang, Information Services Department, Lyman Maynard Stowe Library, University of Connecticut Health Center, Farmington.

History of the Health Sciences and Medical Society Libraries Sections, and Oral History Committee

Joint Invited Speakers Session: Recording for the Future: Demystifying the Oral History Process

Moderator: Heidi Heilemann, Archives and Special Collections, Lane Medical Library, Stanford University Medical Center, Stanford, California.

Overview of the MLA Oral History Project: Diane McKenzie, Health Sciences Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Oral History and Its Value as a Research Technique: Joan S. Ash, Ph.D., Oral History Projects, Oregon Health Sciences University, Portland.

Preparation for the Oral History Interview: Susan Bolda Marshall, Division of Library and Archival Services, American Academy of Pediatrics, Elk Grove Village, Illinois.

Oral History Interview Techniques: Linda Weimer, University Library, Oregon Health Sciences University, Portland.

Products of Oral History Interviews: Present and Future: Elizabeth Figa, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

International Cooperation, Corporate Information Services, Pharmacy and Drug Information, and Public Services Sections

Joint Invited Speaker Session: Dragon, Dragging', and Dragoon: The Cultural Battle for International Copyright Protection

Speaker: Kenneth D. Crews, J.D., Ph.D., School of Law and School of Library and Information Science and Faculties for Copyright Management, Indiana University, Indianapolis.

Pharmacy and Drug Information Section

Invited Speaker Session: The 2000 EMBASE Lecture: The Development of Photodynamic Therapy for Oncology, Ophthalmology, and Other Medical Indications at QLT Phototherapeutics, Inc.

Moderator: Penny Coppernoll-Blach, Kelco Biopolymers, San Diego, California.

Speaker: Noel A. Buskard, M.D., University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and QLT PhotoTherapeutics, Inc.

Research, Collection Development, and Federal Libraries Sections

Joint Invited Speakers Session: Evidence-Based Librarianship: Tools We All Can Use, Part 1

Moderator: Bruce Madge, The British Library, Health Care Information Services, London.

Randomized Controlled Trials in Librarianship: K. Ann McKibbon, Health Information Research Unit, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.

Cohort Studies in Librarianship: Library Education Programs, Collection Resources Use Studies, and Other Applications: Jonathan Eldredge, Ph.D., Health Sciences Center Library, The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

Ethnographic Studies in Librarianship: Michelynn McKnight, Norman Regional Hospital and School of Library and Information Studies, University of Oklahoma, Norman.

After the afternoon sessions, the International Cooperation Section hosted an International Visitor's Reception. The Medical Library Education Section and various library and information science colleges and universities sponsored a Library School Reunion for present and former students and faculty. The Friends of NLM enjoyed a social event later that evening.

CONFERENCE, MAY 8

On Monday morning, the following committees met: Awards Committee, Governmental Relations Committee, Membership Committee, and Publications Committee.

An orientation session was held for section treasurers.

Sunrise seminars were conducted by: Annual Reviews Online, EBSCO Information Services, Gold Standard Multimedia, Inc., ISI ResearchSoft, the National Library of Medicine, OCLC, Ovid Technologies, Inc., SilverPlatter Information, and Swets Blackwell.

Later in the morning, meetings were held by the Fellows of MLA, the chapter benchmarking liaisons, and the Nursing and Allied Resources Section Task Force for Mapping the Literature of Allied Health. The Veterinary Libraries Section held an informal demonstration session entitled: “Live Reference on the Web: The Future Is Now!” The EBM Librarians Working Group and the Chiropractic Library Consortium held meetings before lunch. An OCLC CORC meeting was also held.

The Janet Doe Lecture

Introduction: Sherrilynne Fuller, Ph.D., Health Sciences Libraries, University of Washington, Seattle.

The Road Not Taken: Judith Messerle, Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts. Ms. Messerle was unable to be present at the meeting. Her presentation was delivered by Lucretia W. McClure.

National Library of Medicine (NLM) update

The following NLM staff presented updates on NLM projects and plans: Donald A. B. Lindberg, M.D., spoke of developments in molecular biology information systems, the structure of future research publications, and next generation IAIMS. He outlined NLM's input into national data privacy legislation, developments with patient-controlled medical records, and efforts to determine the value of information for medical decision making. Alexa T. McCray, Ph.D., told of NLM's new Gateway, of a Profiles in Science project, and of a database of clinical trials information for the public. Betsy L. Humphreys spoke about developments with MEDLINEplus and New DOCLINE, provision for full-text resources with LINKOUT, and NLM's move toward more use of Web standards for data storage, access, and retrieval.

Presentation of awards

Following the morning program sessions, President Weise officiated at the awards luncheon and ceremony. She began by thanking Dixie Alford Jones, chair of the Awards Committee, Ruth E. Fenske, Ph.D., chair of the Grants and Scholarships Committee, and jury members for their time and effort. She then called Liz Bailey, president of the Canadian Health Libraries Association/Association des bibliothèques de la santé du Canada (CHLA/ABSC), who presented the CHLA/ABSC Award of Outstanding Achievement to K. Ann McKibbon of the Health Information Research Unit, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. Patrick Ellis, vice president of CHLA/ABSC, was then called on to present an Honorary Life Membership in CHLA/ABSC to Joanne G. Marshall, Ph.D., School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Ms. Weise then announced that this year's Joseph Leiter NLM/MLA Lecture would be given on May 17 by Scott Ratzan, M.D., at the National Library of Medicine. Dr. Ratzan is executive director of Health Communication Technology and Educational Innovation at the Academy of Educational Development in Washington, DC. She reminded the audience that Tom Ferguson, M.D., adjunct associate professor of health informatics at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center, Houston, had delivered the 2000 John P. McGovern lecture the previous day and had received his award. Dr. Ferguson's lecture was entitled “Digital Doctoring: Health Online and the Empowered Medical Consumer.”

President Weise then presented the following awards: An MLA Scholarship was awarded to Laurie Blasingame, a graduate student in library and information science at San Jose State University, Fullerton. The MLA Scholarship for Minority Students was awarded to Cheryl Jacocks-Terrell, in absentia, enrolled in the master's of library and information science program at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

President Weise then introduced Elena Leonova as the 2000 Cunningham fellow, who made brief remarks. Ms. Leonova is the head of the Bibliography Department at the Cardiology Research Complex in Moscow, Russia.

EBSCO/MLA Annual Meeting Grants, providing up to $1,000 each for travel and conference-related expenses, were presented to Anne M. Connor and Debra Hile. Ms. Conner is currently employed as medical librarian at Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital and as outreach librarian at the Northern New Hampshire Area Health Education Center in Littleton. Ms. Hile is currently employed as the assistant librarian for acquisitions services at the Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library at the University of Utah.

An MLA Research, Development, and Demonstration Project grant was presented to Jolene M. Miller, in absentia, who holds a master's degree in library and information science from Kent State University and is currently the reference/education librarian at the Raymond H. Mulford Library at the Medical College of Ohio. Ms. Miller will use the grant to support a survey on issues surrounding the administration of credit courses in information management in U.S. medical schools.

Hospital Libraries Section/MLA Professional Development Grants were awarded to Laura Gerwitz, medical librarian for St. Francis Medical Center, Honolulu, Hawaii, and to Celia Munoz Smith, in absentia, medical librarian at Lawrence Memorial Hospital in Lawrence, Kansas. Ms. Gerwitz will use her grant to attend the ABCs of Intranet Development at this annual meeting. Ms. Smith will use her grant to attend the Mid-Continental Chapter of the Medical Library Association meeting in Denver, during September.

Next, the Medical Informatics Section/MLA Career Development Grants, established to award up to two individuals $1,000 each to support a career development activity that will contribute to the advancement of the field of medical informatics, were awarded to Kathleen Bauer and Kathryn E. Kerdolff. Ms. Bauer is currently a National Library of Medicine informatics fellow at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library of Yale University. She will use her award to design a study that will be used to refine the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library Website and to create a new digital library model for the Yale School of Nursing. Ms. Kerdolff is currently health sciences reference librarian at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, New Orleans, and will use the award for creation of a Web-based catalog and bibliography of state health publications with links to library holdings or full-text locations.

ISI sponsors a fellowship of $2,000, which is given every other year, to foster and encourage superior students who have been admitted to candidacy to conduct doctoral work in medical librarianship or information science. This year's ISI/MLA Doctoral Fellowship is awarded to Christine Marton, a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto. Her project will examine how women seek health information on the Web.

This year's Continuing Education Grant recipient was Barbara Benisch, the department librarian, Department of Surgery, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She will use the grant to attend continuing-education courses at this year's annual meeting.

The Lois Ann Colaianni Award for Excellence and Achievement in Hospital Librarianship is given to a professional who has made significant contributions to the profession in overall distinction or leadership in hospital library administration or service; has produced a definitive publication related to hospital librarianship, teaching, research, or advocacy; or who has developed or applied innovative technology to hospital librarianship. This year's recipient was Jacqueline Brown Ramseur. Ms. Ramseur received her master's degree in library science from the University of South Carolina, Columbia. She is the medical librarian at CaroMont Health, Gaston Memorial Hospital, Gastonia, North Carolina. Ms. Ramseur's special strengths in hospital library work include managing all key responsibilities of the library, including collection development, end-user training, expense management, and customer service.

The Murray Gottlieb Prize, established in 1956 by a gift from the Old Hickory Bookshop to recognize and stimulate health sciences librarians' interest in the history of medicine, was awarded to Maggie Yax for her paper “War as Laboratory: Albert B. Sabin's Military Service and Its Influence on His Poliomyelitis Research and Development of the Oral Poliovirus Vaccine.” Ms. Yax is currently archivist at the Cincinnati Medical Heritage Center.

The ISI/Frank Bradway Rogers Information Advancement Award is sponsored by ISI and recognizes outstanding contributions in the application of technology to the delivery of health sciences information, to the science of information, or to the facilitation of the delivery of health sciences information. The 2000 award was presented to Eric H. Schnell, Ruey Rodman, Eric Hamrick, and Judy Willis for the development of the Prospero Electronic Delivery Project, a Web-based document delivery system at the Prior Health Sciences Library, Ohio State University, Columbus. Mr. Schnell accepted the award on behalf of his colleagues.

The Ida and George Eliot Prize, sponsored by Login Brothers Book Company, was awarded to Cheryl Dee, Ph.D., Carol Burns, and Jocelyn A. Rankin, Ph.D., for their article, “Using Scientific Evidence to Improve Hospital Library Services: Southern Chapter/Medical Library Association Journal Usage Study,” published in the July 1998 issue of the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association.

The Estelle Brodman Award for the Medical Librarian of the Year was established with a gift from Irwin H. Pizer and is given to an association member who has made outstanding contributions to academic medical librarianship as demonstrated by excellence in performance, publications, research, service, or a combination thereof. This year's award was presented to Jeanette C. McCray, of the Arizona Health Sciences Library, University of Arizona, Tucson. Ms. McCray has been an active participant and leader in professional groups at the local, state, regional, and national level. She has been actively involved in the development of the Arizona Health Information Network, Inc., a growing statewide consortium of more than thirty hospitals, academic centers, and a diverse group of government agencies. All of her accomplishments as an academic librarian demonstrate her commitment to the profession.

The Lucretia W. McClure Excellence in Education Award, established in 1998 in honor of one of MLA's most respected members, honors an outstanding educator in the field of health sciences librarianship and informatics who demonstrates skills in teaching, curriculum development, mentoring, research, or leadership in education at local, regional, or national levels. The award was presented to Ana Cleveland, Ph.D., professor of Library and Information Science at the University of North Texas, Denton. She has championed health sciences librarianship in all areas of her work, both in field practice and in her teaching. She is directly responsible for a great number of a new generation of librarians who are entering this field as health sciences librarians.

The Janet Doe Lectureship was awarded to Judith Messerle, in absentia. Earlier that morning, Ms. Messerle's lecture was delivered for her by Lucretia W. McClure. Ms. Messerle is librarian for the Harvard and Boston Medical Libraries at the Countway Library of Medicine. She has been an active member of MLA, past president of MLA, and was appointed an MLA fellow in 1999.

Next, President Weise named Harold Schoolman, M.D., and Shane Godbolt to be designated Honorary Members of MLA. Dr. Schoolman has had a remarkable career. He served the people of this country for thirty-two years, first at the Department of Veteran Affairs and from 1970 at the National Library of Medicine. Dr. Schoolman has actively assisted in shaping programs important to medical libraries, including the National Network of Libraries of Medicine and the licensing of NLM's databases. Dr. Schoolman has long been a champion of “fair use.” He has represented NLM at all congressional hearings on intellectual property issues, and, as a recognized expert on copyright, he regularly kept the NLM Board of Regents apprised about developments in this critical area. Dr. Schoolman was unable to be present to accept the award.

Over the last thirty years, Shane Godbolt, has made important contributions to the health sciences library profession in the United Kingdom, the United States, and continental Europe, in the areas of administration, research, publishing, and international librarianship. She is the director of the Library and Information Development Unit of the North Thames Deanery Area, Executive London Region of the National Health Service. A founding member of the European Association of Health and Information Libraries, as well as a primary force behind the launch of Health Libraries Review (The Review), a professional journal sponsored by the Medical, Health and Welfare Libraries Group of the Library Association (U.K.), Shane has served as an effective and important liaison between libraries in Europe and America. Through The Review and her contacts with the Medical Library Association, she has brought us together by transmitting technological and sociological developments across the continents.

President Weise then named five members of the association to be designated lifelong fellows of MLA:

• Virginia Massey Bowden, Ph.D.: A member of MLA since 1971, Ms. Bowden received her MLA from the University of Kentucky at Lexington and her doctoral degree in library and information science from the University of Texas at Austin in 1994. Dr. Bowden's entire professional career as a librarian has been at the University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio, where she was first employed in 1970 as the part-time library systems analyst. After serving as assistant to the director and associate director, she was appointed library director in March 1985. Dr. Bowden has been active in the South Central Chapter of MLA and on national MLA committees and has served as an associate editor for the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association. She is a distinguished member of the Academy of Health Information Professionals and the 1990 winner of the Louise Darling Medal for Distinguished Achievement in Collection Development in the Health Sciences

• Roy Johnson: A member of the Medical Library Association since 1965, Mr. Johnson received its Certificate of Medical Librarianship, Grade 1, in 1966. From that time on, he has been an active member of MLA's New York-New Jersey Chapter, serving as treasurer and a member of the Executive Committee as well as on many MLA committees at the national level. As one of the premier dental librarians of the United States, Mr. Johnson has become noted for his expertise in collection development. Mr. Johnson has coedited for MLA a list of recommended dental books and journals for non-dental libraries with clinical dentistry programs. On his retirement from his position as director of the Waldmann Library of the New York University College of Dentistry, the dean of the College of Dentistry presented Mr. Johnson with the college's Meritorious Service Award. Mr. Johnson has continued to work as an active member of the community in retirement. In addition to serving as a library consultant, he is an active volunteer for the blind through the talking books program of New York City's Helen Keller Services Program.

• Kathleen Moeller: Ms. Moeller has been director of the Library at Overlook Hospital in Summit, New Jersey, since 1978. Long an advocate of consumer health libraries, Ms. Moeller has been instrumental in their development in the United States. Ms. Moeller has written and lectured extensively on consumer health libraries and was featured on the cover of the July 1997 issue of Library Journal, which published her article, “Consumer Health Libraries: A New Diagnosis.” Ms. Moeller has been an active member in MLA and was a founding member of the Consumer and Patient Health Information Section. Ms. Moeller is a distinguished member of the Academy of Health Information Professionals and was awarded the Hospital Librarian of the Year by the Hospital Library Section of MLA in 1987.

• Wayne J. Peay: Mr. Peay has served as the director of the Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library at the University of Utah since 1984. Mr. Peay has been principal investigator, project director, or participant on sixteen federally or state-funded projects. These projects include the installation of the first higher-education computer network in the state and implementation of a statewide, integrated library system for higher education. Mr. Peay has served as a member of the Board of Directors of MLA, president of the Association of Academic Health Sciences Library Directors, and chair of the National Library of Medicine's Biomedical Review Committee. Mr. Peay presented the Janet Doe Lecture at the centennial meeting of the Medical Library Association in 1998.

• Ada Seltzer: A continuous member of MLA since 1972, Ms. Seltzer is currently director of the Rowland Medical Library at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. She has served MLA in many capacities, including as chair of the Chapter Council and on the Centennial Coordinating Committee. She has held all the senior offices of the Southern Chapter of MLA and was recently nominated president-elect of the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries. Ms. Seltzer is a scholar and an educator; she has taught at the School of Library Studies at the University of South Florida in Tampa and for the Medical Library Association. She is also a Distinguished Member of the Academy of Health Information Professionals.

The Award for Distinguished Public Service was established to honor persons whose exemplary actions have served to advance the health, welfare, and intellectual freedom of the public. This year, the Award for Distinguished Public Service was presented to Representative Rick Boucher from Virginia in Washington, DC, in April by Ms. Weise and members of the Governmental Relations Committee.

With the following words, President Weise then presented the President's Award.

From time to time, the officers and the Board of Directors see that an exceptional contribution has been made to the profession and the goals of the association and, therefore, elect to give a special award recognizing the significant contribution. This year the award is presented to Fred W. Roper, Ph.D., in recognition of his leadership and contributions to the professional development programs of MLA. Fred has been an active member in MLA for more than thirty-four years, serving on or chairing many committees, panels, and task forces. He has served on the MLA Board of Directors and is a past president of the association. As chair of the MLA Task Force on Knowledge and Skills, Fred was instrumental in the development and publication in 1992 of “Platform for Change: The Educational Policy Statement of the Medical Library Association.” He was named a fellow in 1997, received the Noyes award in 1998, and is a distinguished member of the Academy of Health Information Professionals. He is currently dean of the College of Library and Information Science at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. Fred has been a noted leader and innovator and has provided dedicated service to the profession.

Finally, President Weise called on T. Mark Hodges, the 1999 Noyes award winner, to introduce Rachael K. Anderson, the 2000 recipient of the association's highest honor, the Marcia C. Noyes Award. He did so with the following words:

At the centenary meeting in Philadelphia, two years ago, I had the honor of introducing the Janet Doe lecturer. The president came to me afterwards and said: “Gee, Mark, I hope you don't ever get to introduce me.” Rachael, your hour has come!

But not to worry. This is an introduction, not an obituary. And I have already used up a minute of the five that I am allotted.

If you do not know this year's recipient of the Noyes Award and are not aware of her many accomplishments, you are at the wrong luncheon. For a start, she has probably been at this table more often than anyone else who is seated at it right now and more often than just about anyone else in this room today. And if you really do not know about her professional record, I commend to your reading the superb profile of her that Robert M. Braude, Ph.D., wrote in the July 1997 issue of the Bulletin.

I will not blow my remaining time, or waste yours, by enumerating Rachael Anderson's achievements and reciting her CV. Let me instead give you my take on Rachael, based on the thirty some years that I have known her.

First of all, she's a librarian's librarian. Rachael is her own mentor. As Braude writes “She required minimal direction [in the past] (today she requires none).” But she has been a mentor to the rest of us. She has given us confidence in our profession and in ourselves. Who can forget her masterful Janet Doe lecture, “Reinventing the Medical Librarian,“ in 1989?

Secondly, and this should delight this audience, she is a woman's woman. This was driven home to me, and to all of us, when she made her debut on the public stage at the 1976 meeting in Minneapolis. There she spoke on the “Role of Women in Library Administration.” It made me squirm! (We men all idolize her nonetheless.)

Lastly, she is an innovator in her own right. Developments at Mount Sinai, Columbia, Arizona, and elsewhere, owe much to her efforts. And these are the efforts of a down-to-earth librarian, not of an informatician, or a physician, or a theoretician, or some other kind of magician.

The biblical Rachael mourns for her children. The bibliographical one challenges them. Many of Rachael's papers and presentations have set forth challenges. (She has issued so many that she has run out of gauntlets!) But we, the medical library profession, are the better for our response to those challenges.

Rachael has received many honors, but it is a special one that she receives today. It symbolizes our highest esteem and, dare I say, great affection, for the one among us whose “career has resulted in lasting, outstanding contributions to health sciences librarianship.” She has recently announced that she will retire shortly. So, this award crowns a brilliant career.

Friends and colleagues, I give you our centennial president and our millennial Noyes laureate—Rachael Keller Anderson.

President Weise then presented Rachael Anderson with the Marcia C. Noyes Award. Ms. Anderson accepted the award with the following remarks:

As some of you know, I am an “accidental” medical librarian, having landed in a hospital library by chance and circumstance rather than through choice and planning. But our profession and MLA have provided far greater and more exciting opportunities than I could ever have anticipated. It has truly been a privilege to work on issues and initiatives that address fundamental problems and those that have been moving health sciences libraries and librarians in new and important directions.

One of the first was related to the changing complexion of professional leadership at a time when society as a whole was grappling with the role of women. I am proud that we called attention to inequities in our own field and have witnessed significant changes in the last twenty-five years.

Other issues included: (1) addressing the educational needs of librarians to prepare us to assume vital roles in the rapidly changing technological and health care environment, (2) integrating new technologies and the core functions of information access into institution-wide programs, and (3) reaching out to new and remote constituencies—with the accompanying satisfaction of making quality health information accessible to many who are most in need.

I am grateful to numerous colleagues at Mount Sinai and Columbia, in Arizona, and on MLA boards and committees, with whom I have had the privilege to collaborate, and I thank the many of you across the profession who are carrying these initiatives further than we had ever envisioned. I share this wonderful honor with you!

With that, President Weise concluded the Awards Ceremony.

After lunch, the section CE chairs met and the Task Force to Review the Books Publishing Program held focus groups. The Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information held an update session. Opportunity was afforded for Academy Portfolio Preparation Q & A.

Legislative update

Introductions and moderators: Marianne Comegys, Health Sciences Library, Louisiana State University, Shreveport; and Logan Ludwig, Ph.D., Health Sciences Library, Loyola University Chicago Medical Center, Maywood, Illinois.

Panel:

Edward W. Colleran, Rightsholder Relations, Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.

Lucretia W. McClure, Edward G. Miner Library, University of Rochester Medical School, Rochester, New York.

T. Scott Plutchak, Lister Hill Library, University of Alabama, Birmingham.

Dale Dirks, Health and Medicine Council, Washington, DC.

Open forum

Best Practices Through Benchmarking, conducted by the MLA Benchmarking Task Force Steering Committee

Bernie Todd Smith, Werner Health Sciences Library, Rochester General Hospital, Rochester, New York.

Jacqueline Donaldson Doyle, Learning Resources and Continuing Medical Education, Banner Health Arizona, Phoenix.

Rosalind F. Dudden, Tucker Memorial Medical Library, National Jewish Medical and Research Center, Denver, Colorado.

Janice Kaplan, Health Sciences Library, Hartford Hospital, Hartford, Connecticut.

Susan Schweinsberg Long, Medical Library/Wagner Resource Center, Multicare Health System, Tacoma, Washington.

Debra C. Rand, Health Sciences Library, Long Island Jewish Medical Center, North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, New Hyde Park, New York.

Elizabeth A. Reid, Health Science Library, St. Michael's Hospital, Toronto, Canada.

The Association of American Medical College's (AAMC's) better_health@here.now

Valerie Florance, Ph.D., AAMC, Washington, DC.

Poster session

The following posters were on display beginning Monday afternoon and continuing through Tuesday afternoon.

Networking Library Services: Creative Uses for the OPAC: Van B. Afes, Dental Library; and Elise S. Eisenberg, Dental Informatics; New York University College of Dentistry, New York City.

Mapping the Literature of Nursing: Phase 1: Margaret (Peg) Allen, June Levy, Mary Adams, Melody Allison, Yelena Friedman, Carol Galgansky, Jody Guenther, Susan Jacobs, Mary McCann, Claire A. Meissner, Frederick C. Pond, Lola H. Purvis, Barbara Frick Schloman, Helen J. Seaton, Priscilla L. Stephenson, Sheryl R. Stevens, Mary K. Taylor, and Dorice Vieira, Task Force on Mapping the Literature of Nursing, Nursing and Allied Health Resources Section.

E-Promoting Distance Education Support: Francesca Allegri, Martha A. Bedard, and Julia Shaw-Kokot, Health Sciences Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

The McGoogan Stacks Projects: Mary E. Helms, Technical Services; Erin Bauer, Electronic Services; Stuart Dayton, LRC; Rose Schinker, Collection Development; and Sheryl Williams, Serials; McGoogan Library of Medicine, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha.

Women's Health Information Journey: Homa G. Asayesh, Women's Health Resource Centre, Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre, Toronto.

Harnessing the Dragon: Our Blueprint for Success: Rudine Anderson, Reference Department; Sekum Boni-Awotwi; and Darcel Bryant, Cataloging Department; Health Sciences Library, Howard University, Washington, DC.

Health Smart Library: Building a Smart “My Library”: Daniel C. Barkey, Information Technology, Health Sciences Library, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Linda Jeanne Walton, James Shedlock, and Steve Hunt, Galter Health Sciences Library; and Michael Gillam and Jonathan Handler, Emergency Medicine Division, Department of Medicine; Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago.

Information Needs and Uses of Molecular Biologists: The Impact of the Human Genome Project and Molecular Sequence Databases: Joan C. Bartlett, Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto, Toronto.

Reference Statistics: Rethinking Data Collection in the Electronic Age: Kathleen Bauer and Lynn Sette, Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

Using Evidence-Based Marketing in an Academic Health Sciences Library: Suzanne Beckett and Gary Clopton, Information Resource Center; and Nancy Gotcher, Web Consultation Services; Library, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas.

Outreach to County Public Health Departments and Small Hospitals in Michigan for Internet Access and Training: Leslie M. Behm and John B. Coffey, Clinical Library, Michigan State University, East Lansing; and Harvey Brenneise, Electronic Library, Michigan Public Health Institute, Okemos.

Integrating Medical Informatics in the Undergraduate Curriculum: Anita Lambert-Lanning, Lynn Watson, and Mike Evans, Department of Family and Community Medicine, Toronto Western Hospital, Toronto.

Database Approaches to Web Site Development: Candice Benjes, Janis F. Brown, Educational Resources, Norris Medical Library; and Joan Mircheff, School of Medicine; University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Demystifying Collection Development with a Liaison Program: Judy F. Burnham, Administrative and Regional Services; and Sarah Murray; Charles M. Baugh Biomedical Library, University of South Alabama, Mobile.

Transitioning to the Virtual Library: A Canadian Survey of Design, Management, and Access for the Hospital Library: Dean Giustini, UBC Life Sciences Libraries, Biomedical Branch Library, Vancouver Hospital and Health Sciences Centre, Vancouver; and Laurie Blanchard, J. W. Crane Memorial Library Deer Lodge Centre, Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Creating Access to Remote Digital Resources: Catalogs, Databases, and Web Pages: Mary Buttner, Serials and Acquisitions, Lane Medical Library, Stanford University, Stanford, California; and Maggie Wineburgh-Freed and Candice Benjes, Norris Medical Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

The SC Online Wellness Center Project: Barbara A. Carlson, Consumer Health Information and Education, Margaret G. Mauldin, and K. Conyers Bull, Department of Library Science and Informatics, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston.

Testing Usability of Intranet-Based Clinical Support Information: Rosemary Burris and Daphne Plaut, Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research, Portland, Oregon.

SAGE: Demystifying the Dragon of Organizational Culture: Esther E. Carrigan, Nancy Burford, and Chris Foster, Medical Sciences Library, Texas A&M University, College Station.

JCAHO Success. The Library and Hospital Information Systems: Partners in a Large Research and Academic Center: Ann M. Combs, Weston Clinical Library, Health Sciences Libraries, University of Wisconsin, Madison; and Dennis Dassenko, University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics, Madison.

A Current Awareness Service Using PubMed with Web Delivery: Sunny Lynn Worel, Bio-Medical Library, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

“What Do I Do When the Classes Are Over?”: Building a Web Page to Meet Non-Academic Needs of Health Sciences Students: Frank L. Davis, Chandler Medical Center Library, University of Kentucky, Lexington; and Susan Poorbaugh, AHEC Learning Resource Center, Greenblatt Library, Medical College of Georgia, Augusta.

Gearing up for the Adventure: A Stratagem for Long Term Research: Colleen Cuddy, Karen A. Brewer, Roberta Bronson Fitzpatrick, and Richard L. Faraino, New York University School of Medicine, New York; and Sumit Dutta, Primary Care Services, New York University Health Center, New York.

From a Paper Based System to a Database: Using Microsoft Access to Track Reference Desk Usage: Mary Piorun and James F. Comes, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Development of an International Osteopathic Literature Index: Craig S. Elam, Technical Services, Lewis Health Science Library, University of North Texas, Fort Worth; and Lawrence W. Onsager, Still Memorial Library, Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine, Kirksville, Missouri.

Hewlett House: A Consumer Information Resource Center on Breast Cancer: Gerri Flanzraich, New York College of Osteopathic Medicine, Old Westbury, New York; William F. Casey, Health Sciences Library, Nassau County Medical Center, East Meadow, New York; Joan Napolitano, Health Sciences Library, Catholic Medical Center, Jamaica, New York; and Mary L. Westermann-Cicio, Palmer School, Long Island University, Brookville, New York.

Transforming Affiliate and Branch Libraries Through Technology: Joan Dalrymple, Nelson Institute of Environmental Medicine, New York; Xiomara Cruz, New York University Downtown Hospital, New York; and Robert Joven, Hospital for Joint Diseases, Ehrman Medical Library, New York University School of Medicine, New York.

From Trash Can to Working Plan: How to Solve Your Mixed Media Blues: Christine D. Frank, Judith L. Dzierba, William P. Fleming, Toby Gibson, and Elizabeth R. Lorbeer, Library of Rush University; and William F. Karnoscak, McCormick Educational Technology Center; Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center, Chicago.

Customers Served by Technical Services: Use Results for Staff PR: Carole Francq Gall, Collection Management, Ruth Lilly Medical Library, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis.

Internetworking Health Information through Metadata Development—Canadian Health Network: Susan Swing, Metadata Development, Canadian Health Network/Réseau canadian de la santé, Toronto.

Serving the Community through Health Teaching Modules: Elaine Taylor, Mamie Bell, and Susan Lee, Library Services and Patient Education, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, Georgia.

Consumer Health Education at Northwestern Memorial Hospital: Mary L. Gillaspy, Health Learning Center; Sandra E. Gaynor, Nursing Development; and James Shedlock and Linda Jeanne Walton; Galter Health Sciences Library, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago.

Web Publishing Literacy and Consultation: Establishing a New Role: Nancy Gotcher and Gary Clopton, Web Consultation Services; and Mary Snyder, Education Services; Medical Center Library, University of Texas Southwestern, Dallas.

The Internet Rx: Gale G. Hannigan, Informatics for Medical Education; Jose Pliego, Academic Affairs; and Karen Thompson, Ob/Gyn; HSC College of Medicine, Texas A&M University System, Temple.

The Cleveland Clinic Alumni Library: Gretchen A. Hallerberg, Library Services, Cleveland Clinic Alumni Library, The Cleveland Clinic, Ohio.

OSS4LIB: Open Source Systems for Libraries: Daniel Chudnov, Gillian Goldsmith Mayman, and Charles J. Greenberg, Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

Integrating Searching Skills into a First Year Pharmacy Curriculum: Lisa M. Berry, Harrington Library of the Health Sciences, Texas Tech University, Amarillo, Texas.

Grand Rounds Literature Service: Designing Library Services for Clinical Patrons: Deborah E. Hile, Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City.

Tailoring Library Services to Meet User Needs in an Academic/Health Care Environment: Customized Data Delivery through Web Portals: Kim Guenther, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

The Evolving Role of Technical Services in Demystifying Access to Electronic Journals: Mary L. Holcomb, Lillian N. DeBlois, and Jeanette C. McCray, Arizona Health Sciences Library, The University of Arizona, Tucson.

Informatics Opportunities for the Hospital Librarian: Ellen H. Howard, K. K. Sherwood Library, Harborview Medical Center, University of Washington, Seattle.

Information on the Frontline: A Web-Based Central Information Source: Ann Hulton and Sandra G. Franklin, Robert W. Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

Providing Traineeship Experience through Multidisciplinary Collaboration: Jeffrey T. Huber, School of Library and Information Studies; and Susan E. Ward, Department of Health Studies; Texas Woman's University, Denton, Texas.

The Library Solves the Mystery of Writing and Publication: How to Support Writing and Publication in Your Organization: Janette Hatton, Sandy Culley, and Diane Cullinane, Library Services, Hamilton Health Sciences Corporation, Hamilton, Ontario.

Harnessing the Power of the Dragon: Demystifying the Internet for Health Care Consumers: Toni Janik, Hotel-Dieu Grace Hospital; and Patricia A. Black and Maria Giannotti, Windsor Regional Cancer Clinic; Windsor, Ontario.

Designing a Model Full-Text Aggregator: Gabriel R. Rios, Information Services and Learning Resources Center; and Inhye Kim Son, The Claude Moore Health Sciences Library; University of Virginia Health System, Charlottesville.

Eyes Wide Shut: Teaching Practices of the Past Century: Roumiana Katzarkov, Science Library, University of California, Irvine.

Evaluation Research and the Women's Health Matters Website: Christine Marton, Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto, Toronto.

Consortium Policies: Surviving the Downsizing Dragon: Joy C. Kennedy, Northwest Community Healthcare, Health Resource Library, Arlington Heights, Illinois; with Richard S. Klein, Library Services, Scholl College, Chicago; Dalia S. Kleinmutz, Webster Library, Evanston Hospital, Evanston, Illinois; Ann Markham, Library Services, Illinois Masonic Medical Center, Chicago; and Patricia E. Pinksowski, Green-Field Library, Alzheimer's Association, Chicago.

A New Approach to Library Orientation: Alice B. Kuller and Heather Midkiff, Health Sciences Library System, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Brian Lauer, Galter Health Sciences Library, Northwestern University, Chicago.

Taming the Dragon to Create a Harmonious Online Catalog: Neal Nixon and Nancy Utterback, Kornhauser Health Sciences Library, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky.

The HealthWeb Database Project: Final End-Product, Future Prospects: Steven Hunt, Galter Health Sciences Library, Northwestern University, Chicago; Daniel Barkey, Information Technology, Health Sciences Library, University of Wisconsin, Madison; and Linda Jeanne Walton and James Shedlock, Galter Health Sciences Library, Northwestern University, Chicago.

Piloting MDConsult Across a Geographically Diverse Health Delivery System: A Comparison with Other Licensed E-Resources: Cynthia K. Robinson, Pamela Barnard, and James R. Bulger, Allina Health System, Library Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Designing and Implementing CBT (Computer-Based Training) for MEDLINE Instruction: John J. Orriola, Shimberg Health Sciences Library, University of South Florida, Tampa.

1999 Accreditation Survey Experience of Western Washington Hospitals: Susan Schweinsberg Long, Medical Library/Wagner Resource Center, Multicare Health System, Tacoma, Washington.

Using Wireless Technology to Solve a Computer Classroom Design Problem: Dave Piper, Information Technology Center, Arizona Health Sciences Library, The University of Arizona, Tucson.

Intranet Factsheets for MEDLINE and Other Online Clinical Resources: Daphne Plaut and Rosemary Burris, Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research, Portland, Oregon; and Ann H. Haines, Kaiser Permanente Northwest Regional Health Sciences Library, Kaiser Permanente, Clackamas, Oregon.

Teaching the ABCs of Web Grantseeking to Biomedical Researchers: Martha L. Means, University of Washington, Seattle.

Virtual Meetings to Support the Catchum Consortium: Forming a Community in Cyberspace: Melissa DeSantis, Briscoe Library, University of Texas Health Sciences Center, San Antonio; Gale Hannigan, Medical Education, Texas A&M College of Medicine, College Station; Cathy Montoya, Learning Resources Center, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas; Margaret Vugrin, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, Lubbock; and CATCHUM Educational Task Force members: Billy U. Philips, Jr., and Trevor Burt, University of Texas Medical Branch; Herb Hagler, University of Texas Southwestern; Bob Joyce, University of Texas Medical Branch; Larry Laufman, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston; and Gita Varagoor, University of Texas Medical School, Houston.

Electrifying the Respiratory Curriculum on the Web: Brenda L. Seago, Jeanne B. Schlesinger, and Chris L. Stephens, Computer Based Instruction Lab, School of Medicine, Medical College of Virginia (MCV), Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond.

Challenges and Successes in the First Year of Implementing a Single Service Point: Margaret Eilene Moore, User Services; Martha A. Bedard, Library Services; Kathleen A. McGraw, Information Services; Julia Shaw-Kokot, Education Services; and Joe Williams, Support Services; Health Sciences Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Using a Web-Based Telephone Survey to Assess the Information Needs of Public Health Professionals: Susan Sykes Berry and Peggy Mullaly-Quijas, Health Sciences Library, University of Missouri, Kansas City.

Development of a Self-Study Website with MeSH for Medical Librarians: Shinichi Abe, Kokuryo Branch Library, Medical Information Center, Jikei University School of Medicine, Tokyo.

Good News, Bad News: Spending $286K in One-Time Materials Money in Three Months: Melissa M. Nasea, Carolyn Baker, Patricia Greenstein, and Hilda Upton, Laupus Health Sciences Library, East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina.

Librarian Participation in the Preparation of ACHPR Evidence Reports: Pamela M. Corley and Janet L. Nelson, Norris Medical Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

The Evolution of an Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) Website: Margaret Spinner and Robert Vander Hart, Lamar Soutter Library, University of Massachusetts Medical Center, Worcester.

Selecting Database Resources: Assessing User Needs: Richard Nollan, Health Sciences Library and Biocommunications Center, University of Tennessee, Memphis.

Library Grand Rounds: Meeting Clinicians on Their Own Turf: Karen Odato and William Francis Garrity, Dartmouth College Biomedical Libraries, Hanover, New Hampshire.

The National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Greater Midwest Region and South Central Region Consumer Health Outreach Program: Lorna Springston, NN/LM, GMR, Library of the Health Sciences, University of Illinois, Chicago; and Marsha Sullivan, NN/LM, SCR, Texas Medical Center Library, Houston Academy of Medicine, Houston, Texas.

Representation and Uniqueness of Neonatology Acronyms in the UMLS: Ramak R. Amjad and Timothy B. Patrick, Health Management and Informatics; MaryEllen Sievert, School of Information Science and Learning Technologies, University of Missouri, Columbia; Beth G. Carlin, McGoogan Library of Medicine/NNLM, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha; and John Pardalos, Child Health-Neonatology, University of Missouri, Columbia.

Four Saints in Three Acts: Communicable Diseases and Their Patron Saints: Gerald J. Perry, Information Services; and Rebecca J. Smith, Systems and Network Services; Arizona Health Sciences Library, The University of Arizona, Tucson.

Statewide Nursing Initiative: Joan M. Stoddart and Mary Elizabeth Youngkin, Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City.

Evaluation of a Health Sciences Collection Using the Conspectus Method: William Poluha, Carol Cooke, Ada Ducas, Tania Gottschalk, Robert Janke, Janice Linton, Mark Rabnett, Marie Speare, Michael Tennenhouse, and Anne Thornton-Trump, Neil John Maclean Health Sciences Library, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg.

e_publishing@galter.nwu.edu: Brian G. Lauer, Galter Health Sciences Library, Northwestern University, Chicago; Daniel Barkey, Information Technology, Health Sciences Library, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Celia Berdes, Buehler Center on Aging; Linda Jeanne Walton and James Shedlock, Galter Health Sciences Library; and James R. Webster, Buehler Center on Aging; Northwestern University, Chicago.

No Se Habla Espanol?—Providing Medical Information for Spanish Speaking Patrons: Marsha Sullivan, NN/LM, SCR, Texas Medical Center Library, Houston Academy of Medicine, Houston, Texas; with Lorna Springston, NN/LM, GMR, Library of the Health Sciences, University of Illinois, Chicago.

Development of an Aboriginal Health Collection: Janice Linton, Neil John Maclean Health Sciences Library, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg.

Improving Web-Based Access and Delivery of Health Information Resources for Eastern Wisconsin AHEC Nurses: Tammy Mays, Maria Fracchia, and Andrea Bail, Health Sciences Libraries, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The Library's Role in Building a Statewide Women's Health Center: Mary D. Vaughn, Chandler Medical Center Library, University of Kentucky, Lexington.

Collecting Point of Care Questions: Design and Utilization of an Online Survey Tool: Leilani A. St. Anna, Sherry Dodson, and Debra S. Ketchell, Health Sciences Libraries; and Debra Revere, IAIMS Program; University of Washington, Seattle.

Chasing the Dragon: Getting into the Curriculum: Carlos I. Rodriguez, Frank Campbell, Barbara Bernoff Cavanaugh, Patricia Heller, Andrea S. Horne, Sherry Morgan, Anne Seymour, Ruthanne Spatafore, and Mary Pat Wilhem, Biomedical Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Plants that Poison Animals: Old Knowledge and New Evidence: Mitsuko Williams, Library Administration, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Preserving the Past for the Future: Susan Bolda Marshall, Division of Library and Archival Services, Bakwin Library, American Academy of Pediatrics, Elk Grove Village, Illinois.

Legal Aspects of the New Library Service—Online Subject Guides (OSG): Tanya Shkolnikov, Health Sciences Library, State University of New York, Stony Brook.

Read It or Weed It: Preparing the Reference Collection for the New Millennium: Catherine L. Wolfson, Frances L. Chen, Hannah M. Fisher, Fred L. Heidenreich, Mary L. Holcomb, Polin P. Lei, Gerald J. Perry, Mary L. Riordan, and Joan Schlimgen, Arizona Health Sciences Library, University of Arizona, Tucson.

Reference Manager: Electronic Assessment, Promotion, Instruction, and Consultation: Jean L. Siebert and Terrance M. Burton, Health Sciences Library, West Virginia University, Morgantown.

From Cat in the Hat to Campbell's Shrine Librarians Re-Define their Role in the New Millennium: Deanna Simonis, Library Services, Shriners Hospital for Children Northern California, Sacramento; Laura Mueller, Shriners Hospital for Children Chicago Unit, Chicago; and Lynda Van Wagoner, Shriners Hospital for Children Intermountain Unit, Salt Lake City, Utah.

Who, Why, What, How, and Where? Appropriate Use of Library Computer Workstations: Catherine L. Wolfson, Gerald J. Perry, Fred L. Heidenreich, and Hannah M. Fisher, Arizona Health Sciences Library, University of Arizona, Tucson.

The Library User Survey: Strategies for Collecting, Analyzing, and Putting Data to Use: Inhye Kim Son, The Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, University of Virginia Health System, Charlottesville; Anne Wood Humphries, Woodbridge, Connecticut; and Gretchen Naisawald Arnold, The Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, University of Virginia Health System, Charlottesville.

Developing Library Support for Online Distance Education: Judith Z. Emde, Anschutz Library, University of Kansas, Lawrence; and Loretta Spurling, Regents Center Library, University of Kansas, Overland Park.

Providing Access to Medically Underserved Areas: Terri Ottosen, with John M. Carney and Charles Hobbs, King/Drew Health Sciences Library, Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, Los Angeles, California.

Integrated Health Informatics Initiative: An Organizational Approach to Teaching Computing and Informatics Skills at an Academic Health Sciences Center: Janis Teal, Education Services, Health Sciences Center Library, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

Demystifying Document Delivery: Electronic Document Delivery in West Virginia: Nancy J. Wasson, Access Services, Health Sciences Library; and Carroll W. Wilkinson, Wise Library Circulation Services and Colson Reserve Library; West Virginia University Libraries, West Virginia University, Morgantown.

Classes for Unaffiliated Users, a Merger of Outreach and Fee-Based Services: Scott Marsalis and Vicki Louise Glasgow, Biomedical Information Service, Bio-Medical Library, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

NYU School of Medicine Literature Searching: A Continuum from First Year through Fourth Year: Dorice L. Vieira, Educational Services; Richard L. Faraino, James W. Beattie, Jr., Martin S. Nachbar, Bruce I. Bogart, and Julie Chase, Office of Medical Education; New York University School of Medicine, New York.

Consumer Health Information: What Customers Are Asking: Kay E. Wellik and Brittany L. Rice, Mayo Clinic Scottsdale, Arizona.

Demystifying the Library for Residents: Teresa F. Westphal, Ramune K. Kubilius, Barbara Nadler, and Linda Jeanne Walton, Galter Health Sciences Library, Northwestern University, Chicago.

For Richer or Poorer: Outreach via Serials Cancellations: Colleen M. Weum, with Sherry Dodson, Terry Ann Jankowski, Lisa A. Oberg, Jean P. Shipman, and Constance S. Worley, Health Sciences Libraries, University of Washington, Seattle.

Planning a Community Health Library: Christine J. Williams, Akron General Medical Center, Akron, Ohio.

Evolution of a Client-Contact Database: Implementing Client-Centered Evidence-Based Librarianship: Mitchel L. Walters, Helen Mayo, Jeffrey Perkins, and Laura Wilder, The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center Library, Dallas, Texas.

A Current Awareness Service Using PubMed with Web Delivery: Sunny Lynn Worel, Bio-Medical Library, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

Dissemination of Women's Health Information to Community-Based Organizations: Victoria Delgado, Delia Camacho, and Ana Isabel Moscoso, Medical Sciences Campus, Women and Health Center, University of Puerto Rico, San Juan.

Nursing Collection Collaborative Project: Moushumi Chakraborty, Sheppard Library, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, Boston; Ilze M. Olmsted, Collection Development, Simmons College, Boston; and Susan von Daum Tholl, Emmanuel College, Boston.

Benchmarking Library Services: How We Replicated the Canadian Project: Robert M. Pringle, Jr., Betty M. Anderson Library, Intercollegiate Center for Nursing Education, Washington State College of Nursing, Spokane; Robin E. Braun, Empire Health Services Medical Library, Spokane, Washington; and Vicki F. Croft, Veterinary Medicine/Pharmacy Library, Washington State University, Pullman.

Internet Use Among Health Administration Students and Practitioners: Rea Devakos, Gerstein Science Information Centre, Library, University of Toronto, Toronto.

Section programming II

Eight program sessions were scheduled for the late afternoon on Monday:

Cancer Librarians, Hospital Librarians, and Pharmacy and Drug Information Sections

Joint Contributed Papers Session: Demystifying the Library: Expanding Horizons in End-User Training

Moderator: Penny Coppernoll-Blach, Kelco Biopolymers, San Diego.

Reaching out to the Point of Need: Developing and Evaluating a Web-Based Student Information Training Program: Gang Wu, Keir Reavie, Sandra I. Martin, and Ellen Marks, Shiffman Medical Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan.

Demystifying Distance: Videoconferencing and Website Design to Deliver End-User Training to Clinicians at Remote Telemedicine Practice Sites: Gerald J. Perry, Information Services; David Piper, Information Technology Center; and Joan Schlimgen, Access Services; Arizona Health Sciences Library, The University of Arizona, Tucson.

Providing Instruction Anywhere and Any Time: Julia Shaw-Kokot, Barbara Lynn Eades, Claire De La Varre, Robert Ladd, and Margaret Eilene Moore, Health Sciences Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Virtual Classrooms: Integrating Learning Technologies into Remote Library Instruction Programs: Terry A. Henner, Information and Education Services, Savitt Medical Library, School of Medicine, University of Nevada, Reno.

Federal Libraries and Hospital Libraries Sections

Joint Contributed Papers Session: Feng-shui for Surviving the Downsizing Dragon

Moderator: Alice E. Hadley, Medical Library, U.S. Naval Hospital, Barrigada, Guam.

Emerging Trends in the Provision of Library Services at the University Health Network: An Evaluation of the Program Management Model: Brian Cameron and Ani Orchanian, Health Sciences Library, University Health Network, Toronto.

Defense Against Downsizing: Connecticut Hospital Librarians and the CME Review Process: Jeannine Cyr Gluck, Medical Library, Eastern Connecticut Health Network, Manchester, Connecticut; and Robin Ackley Hassig, Health Center Library, University of Connecticut, Farmington.

The Value of Hospital Library Internships: Ruth Holst, Library Services, Medical Library, Columbia Hospital, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The Dynamics of Downsizing: Trends, Patterns, and Strategies: Mary Linn Bergstrom, Education and Outreach Services, Biomedical Library, University of California, San Diego.

Tai Chi and the Art of Downsizing: Linda E. Bunyan, Medical Library/Bookstore, Summa Health System, Akron, Ohio.

Medical Informatics and Library Management and Leadership Sections

Joint Contributed Papers Session: Clinical Applications of Technologies: Linking Knowledge-Based Information to the Clinical Record

Moderator: Diana J. Cunningham, Medical Sciences Library, New York Medical College, Valhalla.

Integration of a Clinical Digital Library into an Electronic Medical Record: Debra S. Ketchell and Leilani A. St. Anna, Health Sciences Libraries, University of Washington, Seattle.

Analysis of Electronic Medical Information Resources in an Ambulatory Care Clinic: Implications for Health Sciences Librarians: Richard L. Faraino, Roberta Bronson Fitzpatrick, Colleen Eklow, and Karen A. Brewer, Ehrman Medical Library, School of Medicine, New York University, New York City; and Sumit Dutta, Primary Care Services, New York University Health Center, New York.

Centres for Health Evidence Demonstration Project: Denise Koufogiannakis, University of Alberta, Edmonton; Tracy Stewart, Centres for Health Evidence; Robert S. A. Hayward, M.D., Health Informatics Program and Department of Medicine; Ellen Crumley; and Ada Ducas, Neil John Maclean Health Sciences Library; University of Manitoba, Winnipeg.

Toward a Value Model of Online Full-Text Resources: Determining the Elements that Influence Clinicians' Judgments about the Value of Information Technology: Guillaume Van Moorsel, Education Services and Information Technologies, Health Sciences Center Library, State University of New York, Stony Brook; Michael Hamlin, Ph.D., Pepperdine University, Malibu, California; and Marvin Gozum, M.D., Clinical Informatics, and Elizabeth R. Warner, Academic Information Services and Research (AISR), Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

A Discovery-Support System Based upon the Classificatory Structure of Records in the MEDLINE Database: Linda Hogan, Pittsburgh Mercy Health System Libraries and Archives, Mercy Hospital, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Public Services and Medical Library Education Sections

Joint Contributed Papers Sessions: On the Wings of the Dragon: Transforming Core Competencies into Practice: Developing Present and Future Information Services Professionals

Moderator: Susan E. Meadows, Department of Family and Community Medicine Library, University of Missouri, Columbia.

Creating and Transforming a Library Service Philosophy into Professional Practice: Jeanne Marie Le Ber, Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City.

Academic Mentorship: An Effective Professional Development Strategy for Medical Reference Librarians: Hongjie Wang, Information Services Department, Lyman Maynard Stowe Library, University of Connecticut Health Center, Farmington.

The Tao of Medical Librarianship—Setting the Gold Standard: Margaret L. Moutseous, Learning Resource Center, Northwest State Community College, Archbold, Ohio.

Advancing Technology in the Workplace to Promote Sharing and Reusing Knowledge: Annette Williams, Nunzia B. Giuse, M.D., Deb Morley, Information Systems, and Nila Sathe, Library Research, Eskind Biomedical Library, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee.

Interactive Professional Development: Building upon Core Competencies for Reference Staff: Karla Block, Julia Ann Kelly, and Kathryn Robbins, Bio-Medical Library, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

Hospital Libraries Section

Invited Speakers Session: The Hospital Automation Forum: Hospital Libraries and the Internet in the New Millennium

Moderator: Mindy R. Paquette-Murphy, Sanofi-Synthelabo Research Division, Malvern, Pennsylvania.

Gazing into the Digital Crystal Ball: Advanced Technologies and the Hospital Librarian: Eileen H. Stanley, Center for Biomedical Informatics, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Integrating Knowledge Resources at the Point of Care: Opportunities and Strategies for Hospital Librarians: Sherrilynne Fuller, Ph.D., Health Sciences Libraries, University of Washington, Seattle.

Librarians' Roles in the Hospital Library: What Changes and What Doesn't: Edwin A. Holtum, Administrative and Access Services, Hardin Library for the Health Sciences, University of Iowa, Iowa City.

International Cooperation Session

Invited Speaker Session: Getting Health Information to the World: International Programs at the National Library of Medicine

Moderator: Donna B. Flake, Medical Library, Coastal Area Health Education Center, Wilmington, North Carolina.

Speaker: Elliot Siegel, Ph.D., Office of Health Information Programs Development, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland.

Library Management and Leadership Section

Invited Speakers Panel: You Never Stop Learning: Developing Leadership Skills Throughout Your Career

Moderator: T. Scott Plutchak, Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences and Academic Programs Information Technology, University of Alabama, Birmingham.

Panelists:

Rachael K. Anderson, Arizona Health Sciences Library, University of Arizona, Tucson.

Patricia J. Hamilton, Library and Educational Services, Rapid City Regional Hospital, Rapid City, South Dakota.

Pat Higginbottom, Information and Instructional Services, Lister Hill Library, University of Alabama, Birmingham.

Carolyn Anne Reid, The Samuel J. Wood Library, C. V. Starr Biomedical Information Center, Cornell University Medical College, New York.

Patricia L. Thibodeau, Medical Center Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

Veterinary Medical Libraries Section

Sharing Session: Innovations and Collaborations in Veterinary Libraries: A Facilitated Network Session

Moderator: Rebecca A. Davis, Carlson Health Sciences Library, University of California, Davis.

Following the afternoon sessions, the Editors' Guild held a meeting. The Hospital Libraries section held a “Connection” reception. The following SIGs held informal meetings: African-American Medical Librarians Alliance, Department of the Army Medical Command Libraries, Department of Veterans Affairs Librarians, Family Practice, Geriatrics and Gerontology, Mental Health, Molecular Biology and Genomics, Outreach, Pediatric Librarians, Problem-Based Learning, and Rehabilitation Hospital. Other groups holding meetings were the Health Science Innovative Users Group and the Health Sciences Library System, University of Pennsylvania. A reception was held for NLM Associates.

CONFERENCE, MAY 9

On Tuesday, May 9, the following committees and groups held early-morning meetings: Benchmarking Task Force, Bylaws Committee, Chapter CE Chairs, Editorial Board of the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, Joseph Leiter NLM/MLA Lectureship Committee, and the Task Force to Review the Books Publishing Program. The CHLA/ABSC held its annual general meeting.

At the same time, Sunrise Seminars were conducted by: Current Drugs, Ltd., EBSCO Information Services, Gold Standard Multimedia, Inc., ISI, ISI ResearchSoft, The National Library of Medicine, Ovid Technologies, Well-Connected from Nidus Information, and UpToDate.

Plenary Session II

Introduction: Jim Henderson, Medical Library Service, College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia, University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

The Ecological Millennium: Setting the Bottom Line: David Suzuki, Ph.D., Sustainable Development Research Institute, University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

Business session II

President Frieda Weise called the session to order and immediately asked those present to stand for a moment of silence in memory of another MLA member who recently died, Esperanza A. Moreno. She next verified that a quorum was present.

President Weise then extended thanks and presented certificates to retiring board members Diane G. Schwartz and Bernie Todd Smith. She next presented a special plaque to Jacqueline Donaldson Doyle as retiring immediate past president of MLA. President Weise welcomed and introduced incoming board members Carol G. Jenkins, Lynn M. Fortney, and Mark E. Funk. President-Elect J. Michael Homan rose to present Frieda Weise with an outgoing presidential gift.

President Weise then presented to the assembly and passed the presidential gavel to the MLA 2000/2001 president, Michael Homan, who gave his inaugural address.

Inaugural address: Promoting a Passion for the Profession—Keeping Our Eyes on the Prize!

Michael Homan: It is a particular honor for me to be in this exquisitely beautiful city of Vancouver, British Columbia. I am pleased to address members, boards, staff, and guests of the Medical Library Association (MLA) and the Canadian Health Libraries Association/Association des Bibliothèques de la Santé du Canada (CHLA/ABSC). My first visit to British Columbia was as an undergraduate student at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, in the late 1960s. The occasion was a political science field trip to observe Parliament in Victoria. I remember getting seasick on the ferry crossing from Washington State to Vancouver Island. We stayed at the venerable Empress Hotel, a short walk from the Parliament building. My second visit to the province was in the early 1970s. On my second visit, I was able to spend some quality vacation time in Vancouver. The city has changed quite a bit in twenty-five years, but it is still as beautiful as I remember it! Let us give our thanks to a previous MLA Board for choosing Vancouver as the site for our 2000 meeting.

The Canadians and MLA

Using Mark Hodges' 1997 Janet Doe lecture [1] on MLA's annual meetings as a guide, the joint meeting this year is the fourth time that MLA has met in Canada, beginning with the 1930 meeting in Montreal, followed by Toronto in 1959, and Montreal again in 1981. On the occasion of the second meeting of MLA in Toronto in 1959, then Past-President Thomas E. Keys, librarian of the Mayo Clinic, was invited to give a short talk entitled “Canada's Contribution to the Medical Library Association” [2]. In his remarks, Keys began with a quotation from another MLA President W. B. McDaniel:

A gracious dispensation of poetic justice permits us to begin our story with the mother of the Medical Library Association herself, Miss Margaret Anne [Ridley] Charlton, variously of Montreal and Toronto—she who, in 1898, played the role of our institutional Eve to the Adam of, some say, Dr. William Osler; others, Dr. George M. Gould [3].

The issue of primary recognition for forming the new association remains somewhat of a mystery. Even Marcia Noyes was unable to pry this information from Margaret Charlton years later. What was incontrovertible, however, was the fact that two out of the three founders of MLA were Canadians!

At the huge risk of leaving someone out, let me mention some recent Canadian contributors to medical librarianship, MLA, and CHLA/ABSC, who have enhanced the contributions of the early Canadian founders of MLA, Margaret Charlton, and Dr. Osler. Frances Groen, currently university librarian at McGill University, was MLA president in 1989/90 and the author of a delightful and scholarly study of Osler, Gould, and Charlton entitled “Three Who Made an Association.” Ms. Groen's paper was published in the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association (BMLA) in July 1996 and reprinted in the centennial issue of the BMLA in April 1998 [4]. Joanne G. Marshall, Ph.D., who was awarded Honorary Life Membership in CHLA/ABSC at the awards luncheon on May 8, 2000, has recently served on the MLA Board of Directors and was associate chair of the Vancouver annual meeting. Marshall's 1992 study published in the BMLA entitled “The Impact of the Hospital Library on Clinical Decision Making: The Rochester Study” is the most-cited work by a large margin of any paper ever published in the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association. Well-known educator and author K. Ann McKibbon was honored at the awards luncheon on May 8, 2000, with the CHLA/ABSC Award of Outstanding Achievement. Personally, I shall always remember the late Beatrix Robinow as a gentle but firm mentor as I became active in committee work of MLA. And, finally, it was to Canadian author Jennifer Connor that MLA looked to write a history of MLA that has just been published.

Coincidentally, I am the second librarian of the Mayo Clinic to be elected president of MLA, and it is now over forty years since the first MLA president from Mayo, Thomas E. Keys, extolled the virtues of our colleagues to the north at the 1959 meeting in Toronto. It seemed appropriate to do so again and to thank our Canadian colleagues for their warm reception and hospitality during this meeting in Vancouver. Through the wizardry of Liz Bayley and Jim Henderson and Brett A. Kirkpatrick and Joanne Marshall, we have held a great joint meeting.

A passion for the profession—keeping our eyes on the prize!

The overall theme for this association year that I proposed last February to the Board of Directors (and which they graciously acceded to) was “Promoting a passion for the profession—keeping our eyes on the prize!” As a profession, our timeless professional values and ultimate societal worth remain as vital and important today as they were when the association was founded more than 100 years ago. However, our “value” is being challenged outside the profession and questioned inside the profession, often driven by the dazzle and hype of information technology.

I want to tell you a couple of personal stories about professional passion and technology to illustrate the theme for this association year. The first occurred in 1973. The second occurred more recently, on March 27, 2000, to be exact. You can think of these stories as technological bookends representing advances in information technology that have occurred in the last twenty-five years. Our passion for the profession and our societal value need not be diminished by changes in technology or scholarly publishing. The “prize,” after all, is still “quality information for improved health.” That was true in 1973, and it is still true today.

An early Internet application

The first story occurred in 1973 in Hawaii. The venue was the basement of the Hawaii Medical Library on the grounds of Queens Hospital in Honolulu. It was the first MEDLINE class for Hawaiian medical librarians, taught by Michael Homan and Angie Durso from the Regional Medical Library at UCLA. The class was taught not long after MEDLINE on ELHILL made its debut at the National Library of Medicine. For three weeks, we studied MeSH classification and did online training exercises using slow terminals with acoustic couplers. This was the same three-week training class offered at UCLA and the National Library of Medicine (NLM).

There was a technological difference between classes taught at UCLA or NLM and the first MEDLINE class taught in Hawaii. The terminals with thermal printers were connected via acoustic couplers and phone lines to the University of Hawaii, Manoa. From the University of Hawaii, our signal was transmitted via ARPAnet satellite to Stanford University and then traveled through the research institutions linked to the ARPAnet to the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, DC. From the National Bureau of Standards, the signal went via telephone line to the National Library of Medicine, which was not an ARPAnet institution at the time. Sometimes NLM forgot to open the special phone line to the ELHILL computer, and we had to call to remind them. Overall, the connections worked reasonably well. What dawned on me several years ago, while listening to some Internet hype (the usual information superhighway stuff), was that our little class in Hawaii was one of the first applications of searching remote medical databases via what eventually became the Internet.

Although interesting in retrospect from a technological point of view, none of us in that Hawaiian class really cared too much about the technology, as long as it worked. The Hawaiian librarians were interested in learning the structure of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and indexing principles and techniques of online searching. Their passion was learning a new method through which they could deliver quality information to the health care team more efficiently than ever before. The prize was the effect of quality information on health care outcomes and scientific decision making. The technology was of secondary importance and of little interest (except when NLM forgot to open the phone line!). That is not to say that technology was unimportant. After all, telecommunication advances and development of the ARPAnet allowed the connection to the NLM computers but were considered tools.

Before I tell you my second story, I would like to underscore the changes in technology that occurred since the Hawaiian medical librarians first used the Internet in the early 1970s. I think we are all aware of the sea change brought about by the Internet and the development of the Web, but a list issued by Beloit College in Wisconsin provided me with a different and compelling perspective.

Beloit College freshmen

Beloit College in Wisconsin posts a list each year to give the faculty some sense of the entering class [5]. Let me read selected portions from the 1999 list.

• The people who are starting college this fall across the nation were born in 1982.

• They have no meaningful recollection of the Reagan Era and probably did not know he had ever been shot.

• They were prepubescent when the Persian Gulf War was waged.

• Tianamen Square means nothing to them.

• The expression “you sound like a broken record” means nothing to them.

• They have never owned a record player.

• They may have never heard of an eight track. The compact disc was introduced when they were one year old.

• They have always had an answering machine.

• Most have never seen a TV set with only thirteen channels, nor have they seen a black-and-white TV.

• There have always been VCRs, but they have no idea what BETA is.

• They cannot fathom not having a remote control.

• They were born the year Sony introduced the Walkman.

• Jay Leno has always been on the Tonight Show.

• There has always been MTV.

• They do not have a clue how to use a typewriter.

I am beginning to feel old. How about you? As we are all aware, there have been sea changes in technology affecting both our personal and professional lives. These technological changes continue to remake our personal and professional worlds, particularly Web applications related to scholarly publishing and library applications. Although not specifically reported, I think we can be fairly certain that the majority of the 1999 entering class at Beloit College are undoubtedly quite familiar with the Web and a variety of application software programs.

The new generation of physicians and other health care professionals with whom we work soon will be, or are currently, highly sophisticated in the use of information technology. After all, they grew up with it. They will not know or remember the time when manual searches of Index Medicus were required, when MEDLINE was accessed on teletypewriters at ten characters per second, or when standard textbooks and journals were once published only in a paper format. But, I suppose I am preaching to the choir at this point.

PubMed Central National Advisory Committee

Now, I want to tell you my second story to complete the technological bookends. It is a story about a national advisory committee meeting. I will use some terminology that is relatively new and some definitions may be useful.

PubMed: You all know this system. It was developed at the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and succeeded the ELHILL system as the host of the MEDLINE finding tool. It has the “related paper” feature and includes pre-MEDLINE data and links to the full text of traditional peer-reviewed journal literature from approximately 700 participating publishers.

PubMed Central: This is the new international, barrier-free digital archive of full-text, peer-reviewed primary research reports including traditional journals in an electronic format and new electronic journals. The new repository supports both HTML and pdf versions as well as supplemental information including video. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) E-biomed proposal was transformed into PubMed Central and PubMed Express.

PubMed Express: This system is intended as a preprint server system, separate from PubMed Central, to archive primary research reports in the life sciences that have been screened, but not peer-reviewed.

Keeping these definitions in mind, the venue of my second story was the Board of Regents meeting room at the National Library of Medicine. The date was Monday, March 27, 2000, and the Washington, DC, area was experiencing a beautiful spring. The cherry blossoms were in bloom. The occasion was the first meeting of the PubMed Central National Advisory Committee. Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg had accepted the invitation to chair the advisory committee. Nobel laureate Harold Varmus, late of the NIH and a proponent of the original E-biomed proposal, was appointed to the committee and was present at the first meeting. Physicist Paul Ginsparg, Ph.D., of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and father of the electronic preprint service in physics hosted at Los Alamos was also present. The NIH appointed three librarians to the advisory committee. The librarians appointed to the committee were Michael Homan from the Mayo Clinic, James Williams from the University of Colorado, and James Neal from Johns Hopkins University. Homan and Williams were present at the first meeting. Also appointed to the committee were a variety of scientists and editors, including the editor of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Donald Lindberg, M.D., Kent Smith, and David Lipman, M.D., represented NLM and NCBI.

The meeting began with a proper round of introductions followed by a project update from Dr. David Lipman, NCBI director. The work of the scientists at the NCBI has been impressive and the technology to process, host, and display a digital archive has been put into place in a relatively short period of time and under public scrutiny. Two journals are currently available in the new repository (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/) with more to come, including links to the PubMed finding tool.

The national advisory committee began by reaffirming the essential goals of PubMed Central:

• to create a repository for the full text of life sciences research articles that is freely accessible to all; and

• to ensure that the content in the repository can evolve into a robust digital archive allowing content not only to be read, but also to be used in new ways, such as in an integrated manner with other data sources.

On the matter of the development of PubMed Express, the national advisory committee underscored the importance of getting PubMed Central itself running smoothly, before reassessing the preprint server component. Issues related to PubMed Express will be discussed at the fall 2000 meeting of the national advisory committee.

I would submit that the principle that our National Library of Medicine will host a barrier-free, full-text, robust digital archive, rather than serving solely as a switching point for links to full-text information residing elsewhere, is a dramatically important direction for scholarly communication in the life sciences. As you may imagine, this new direction may potentially create adversarial relationships with existing journal publishers (both traditional and electronic), journal aggregators, and research libraries that have established digital publishing service bureaus.

While various enabling technologies such as the Web and Internet have permitted the rapid deployment of the new PubMed Central full-text repository, that is not where the passion lies. The passion lies in the conceptualization of a new structure for scientific communication and not in the technology that allows it to happen. The prize is barrier-free access to quality information for improved health and scientific decision making. Our profession will have a major role to play in this new conception.

I hope you plan to attend Plenary Session III on May 10, 2000, when Dr. Paul Ginsparg from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Betsy Humphreys from the National Library of Medicine present “Demystifying Electronic Publishing: Revelations on the Revolution in Publishing.”

Association priorities for 2000/2001

The rapid technological developments we have experienced in our profession and the rapidly changing scene of scholarly publishing and intellectual property issues have prompted me to suggest that we devote time to thinking about our vision of the future and strategic direction of health sciences librarianship. The two stories with which I began are radically different. The first describes a print world in which an innovative online finding tool allowed us to identify documents in a more efficient way than a printed index. The second describes an entirely new world of digital repositories and integrated systems in which answers can be found, not merely documents that might have answers, and entirely new knowledge created. This new era that we find ourselves in is what some have called the knowledge age. I predict that continued enhancements in information technology will make the knowledge age the greatest era ever to be a medical librarian.

As we begin our new association year, let me tell you about some commitments and predictions that will guide our activities. I will read these in the form of commitments to MLA members.

Commitments and predictions

• By this time next year, MLA and at least one major university will have concluded an agreement to offer a “certification in information technology” via distance education, and MLA's continuing-education program will include a technology specialization track.

• By this time next year, the response time of MLA's Website, MLANET, will be as fast as PubMed and will offer an even greater array of valuable virtual association services so important to the association's growth and vitality in the networked knowledge age.

• By this time next year, the BMLA will be available in full text online and continue a 100-year commitment to preserving and promoting the best evidence of health sciences librarianship.

• By this time next year, there will be a methodology to evaluate and publish the results of research presented at the MLA annual meetings, as yet another commitment to preserving and promoting best evidence in health sciences librarianship.

• By this time next year, MLA will have examined its strategic plan and will have developed a vision of health sciences librarianship that responds proactively to the rapidly changing environments in technology and scholarly publishing.

• By this time next year, strategic initiatives related to the Hay Associates salary study and the value of information initiative will be underway.

• By this time next year, a production version of the hospital library benchmarking project will be assisting hospital librarians and, in five years, the value of the hospital library database will be on a par with Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL), Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), and Association of Research Libraries (ARL) data.

I look forward to a great year working with the board and headquarters staff promoting a passion for the profession and keeping our eyes on the prize. Thank you for your attention.

RESULUTION

Mr. Homan then called on Judith G. Robinson, chair of the 2001 National Program Committee, to propose the following resolution:

Whereas, the 2000 National Program Committee chaired by Brett A. Kirkpatrick and associate chair, Joanne G. Marshall, Ph.D., with Liz Bayley, CHLA/ABSC president and representative to the 2000 National Program Committee, have joined together with their committee members to demystify the dragon in order to provide some strategies for 2000 plus; and

whereas, the 2000 Local Assistance Committee chaired by Jim Henderson has provided glorious guidance and support to new attendees; and

whereas, the MLA headquarters staff and professional planners have worked tirelessly to facilitate planning of the 2000 meeting; and

whereas, the association's elected officers, committee members, member speakers, and member continuing-education instructors have contributed their time to enrich the professional lives of their colleagues,

therefore, be it resolved that the membership of the Medical Library Association extends its profound appreciation and deep-felt thanks to the 2000 National Program Committee, members of CHLA/ABSC, in particular those assisting the program and local assistance committee activities, the MLA headquarters staff, and the professional planners.

The resolution was adopted by acclamation.

Next, Mr. Homan, along with Faith A. Meakin, chair of the 2001 Local Assistance Committee, and many others, performed a brief skit and showed a short video to invite members to the next year's annual meeting in Orlando.

President Homan called on Diane Schwartz, who moved for adjournment. The motion passed and the One Hundredth Annual Meeting of the Medical Library Association was declared adjourned.

During the noon hours, the CHLA/ABSC Chapter Presidents Lunch was held. The following MLA Sections held business meetings: Cancer Librarians, Consumer and Patient Health Information, Corporate Information Services, Federal Libraries, History of the Health Sciences, Hospital Libraries, Library Management and Leadership, Medical Informatics, Medical Library Education, Nursing and Allied Health Resources, Public Health/Health Administration, Technical Services, and Veterinary Medical Libraries.

Section Programming III

Seven program sessions were scheduled concurrently Tuesday afternoon.

Consumer and Patient Health Information Section

Contributed Papers Session: Moving Toward the Mainstream: Providing Consumer Health Information in the Community Setting

Moderator: Michele A. Spatz, Planetree Health Resource Center, Mid-Columbia Medical Center, The Dalles, Oregon.

Networking Canadian Consumers and Health Information Organizations: The Canadian Health Network—the First Six Months: Miriam Ticoll, Resource and Web Development, Canadian Health Network, Toronto; and Lea K. Starr, Western Regional Operating Partner, Canadian Health Network, Vancouver.

Evaluating a Consumer Health Website's Interface: Heuristic Evaluation and Usability Testing: Keith W. Cogdill, Ph.D., College of Library and Information Services, University of Maryland, College Park.

Knowledgeable Clinicians Advising Knowledgeable Patients: Information Age Health Care in the United Kingdom: Veronica Fraser, National Health Service (NHS) Executive, United Kingdom; and Bob Gann, NHS Direct Online, United Kingdom.

Providing Consumer Health Information in a Rural Area: A Decentralized Approach: Brian Bunnett, Libraries, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas.

Medical Librarian to the World: The HealthCentral.com Experience: Rochelle Perrine Schmalz, HealthCentral.com, Emeryville, California.

Educational Media and Technologies Section

Contributed Papers Session: Growth and Harmony, Part 1: Innovative Solutions to Networking Issues

Moderator: Brenda Faye Green, Instructional Services, Health Sciences Library, University of Tennessee, Memphis.

Maybe They Weren't So Dumb After All: Windows-Based Terminals for Public Access in the Library: Daniel Angelucci and Susan C. Speer, Information Resources, Wake Area Health Education Center, Raleigh, North Carolina.

Open Source Software for Libraries: The Prospero Experience: Eric H. Schnell, Automation Services, John A. Prior Health Sciences Library, The Ohio State University, Columbus.

Web Generation: A Medical Library's Role as Medical Center Web Designers and Indexers: Mary Jo Dorsey, Ehrman Medical Library, School of Medicine, New York University, New York.

Laptops: No Dragon Wires with Wireless Technology: Deborah H. Sibley, Mary Piorun, and Mary Ann Slocomb, The Lamar Soutter Library, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Medical Informatics, Library Management and Leadership, and Public Health/Health Administration Sections

Joint Contributed Papers Session: Life-Long Learning: Information Competencies for the Health Practitioner

Moderator: Gail Persily, Informatics Education, Library and Center for Knowledge Management, University of California, San Francisco.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Reflection on the Use of an Independent Study Program for Assessing and Building Computer and Information Retrieval Competencies: Karen K. Grandage and Linda A. Watson, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

S Is for Searching: Teaching the ABCs of Internet Skills for Clinical Information Problem Solving: P. F. Anderson, Dentistry Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Mastering Medical Information: Foundations for a Lifetime of Learning: Julia Sollenberger and Kathryn W. Nesbit, Edward G. Miner Library, University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, New York.

Research to Practice: Faculty/Librarian/Clinician Collaboration to Teach Core Information Competencies in the Curriculum: Emily Hull and Janet G. Schnall, Health Sciences Libraries, University of Washington, Seattle.

Real-Time Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) Searching Instruction: A Randomized Controlled Trial in the Neonatal ICU (NICU): Doreen R. Bradley, Patricia W. Martin, and Gurpreet Kaur Rana, Taubman Medical Library; and Robert E. Schumacher, Department of Pediatrics; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Relevant Issues, Consumer and Patient Health Information, History of the Health Sciences, International Cooperation, and Medical Society Libraries Sections

Joint Invited Speaker and Contributed Papers Session: East/West: Merging Trends in Medical Therapeutics

Moderator: Edwina (Winn) Theirl, Chandler Medical Center Library, University of Kentucky, Lexington.

Dragons and Debutantes: Integrative Medicine Comes Out?: Allan Best, Ph.D., Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Evaluation, Vancouver Hospital and Health Sciences Centre, Vancouver.

As the Dragon Turns…: Sharon A. Lezotte, National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Midcontinental Region, McGoogan Library of Medicine, Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha.

The Best of Both Worlds: Building a Virtual Reference Service for Integrative Medicine: David J. Owen, Ph.D., Basic Sciences and Clinical Pharmacy, Library and Center for Knowledge Management, University of California, San Francisco.

Evidence-Based Complementary Care: The Librarian's Role on a Complementary Medicine Assessment Committee (CMAC): Diane G. Wolf, Medical Libraries, Christiana Care Health System, Wilmington, Delaware.

Hospital Libraries and Federal Libraries Sections

Joint Invited Speakers Session: JCAHO and KBI—Using Them to Build Stronger Hospital Libraries

Moderator: Michael R. Kronenfeld, Health Sciences Library, Maricopa Integrated Health System, Phoenix, Arizona.

Integrating Performance Measurement into Accreditation: A View from the Joint Commission: Jerod M. Loeb, Research and Performance Measurement, Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois.

JCAHO and KBI: Tools to Build Stronger Hospital Librarians: Debra C. Rand, Health Sciences Library, Long Island Jewish Medical Center, New Hyde Park, New York; and Jacqueline Donaldson Doyle, Learning Resources and Continuing Medical Education, Banner Health Arizona, Phoenix.

Nursing and Allied Health Resources and Dental Sections

Joint Invited Speaker Session: High Quality Clinical Studies in Nursing—Where Are They Published?

Speaker: K. Ann McKibbon, Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.

Veterinary Medical Libraries Section

Invited Speaker Session: SPARC and BioOne: New Alternatives for Scholarly Publishing

Moderator: Rebecca A. Davis, Carlson Health Sciences Library, University of California, Davis.

Speaker: Julia Blixrud, Public Programs, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), Association of Research Libraries, Washington, DC.

Following the afternoon sessions, the Benchmarking Initiative held “One More Opportunity for Questions and Answers,” and the Credentialing Committee held a Chapter Liaisons Update. The following SIGs held informal meetings: Clinical Librarians, Complementary Medicine, Internet, Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual Health Sciences Librarians, Molecular Biology and Genomics, Osteopathic Libraries, Vision Science, and White House Conference on Library and Information Services. The following other groups also held meetings: Academic Press, HealthWeb, Ovid User Group, Voyager Health Science SIG, and QuickDoc Users Group.

The farewell reception, “A Canadian Farewell,” was held at the Hotel Vancouver.

CONFERENCE, MAY 10

The following committees and groups met in the early morning: Continuing Education, Grants and Scholarships, MLANET Editorial Board, Oral History, and Section Program Planners.

Section Programming IV

Eight program sessions were scheduled concurrently during the morning on Wednesday.

Educational Media and Technologies Section

Contributed Papers Session: Growth and Harmony, Part 2: Use of Technology to Design Space, Allocate Resources, and Organize Collections

Moderator: Cynthia L. Henderson, John A. Graziano Health Sciences Library, Samuel Merritt College, Oakland, California.

Creating Growth and Harmony—Bringing the Pieces of the Puzzle Together: Margaret Moutseous, Learning Resource Center, Northwest State Community College, Archbold, Ohio.

Exercise Your Resources: A Library Initiative to Provide Easy Access to Information for Three Separate Clinical Staffs Using a Mix of Information Platforms: Janice Kaplan, Health Science Libraries, Hartford Hospital, Hartford, Connecticut.

Harnessing the Dragon: Stand Alone, Cross-Platform Databases in an Archival Setting: Richard H. Nollan, Health Sciences Library, University of Tennessee, Memphis.

Use of Online Statistics for Decision-Making: Nancy Hrinya Tannery and Barbara A. Epstein, Falk Library of the Health Sciences; and Deborah A. L. Silverman, Health Sciences Library System; University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

National Program Committee

Contributed Papers Session: Strategic Approaches I: Special General Session Highlighting Critical Issues for the Future

Moderator: Jean Williams Sayre, National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Greater Midwest Region, Library of the Health Sciences, University of Illinois, Chicago.

Libraries and Information Management in 2010: Possible Futures: Valerie Florance, Ph.D., Association of American Medical Colleges, Washington, DC.

Distance Education or Classroom Instruction—Does It Make a Difference to the Instructor or the Student?: Connie Schardt and Julie Garrison, Medical Center Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; and Julia Kochi, Digital Library Operations, Library and Center for Knowledge Management, University of California, San Francisco.

Making Money Unraveling the Web: Cynthia H. Goldstein, The Medical Library, Tulane School of Medicine, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Are Dragons Really Free? A Comparative Study of the Costs of Online Journal Access: Frances L. Chen, Collection Development, Arizona Health Sciences Library, University of Arizona, Tucson; Judith L. Rieke, Harley French Library, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks; and Paul Wrynn, Collection Development, Ehrman Medical Library, New York University Medical Center, New York.

Data Mining: Automatically Building Bibliographic Records for E-Journal Articles on the Internet: Ying Li, Dick R. Miller, Mary Buttner, and Pamela M. Murnane, Lane Medical Library, Stanford University, Stanford, California.

National Program Committee

Contributed Papers Session: Strategic Approaches II: Special General Session Highlighting Critical Issues for the Future

Moderator: Diane J. Cunningham, Medical Sciences Library, New York Medical College, Valhalla.

Internet Innovations: Digital Video to the Desktop: Wayne Peay and Nancy T. Lombardo, Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library; and Jimmy Miklavcic, Center for High Performance Computing; University of Utah, Salt Lake City.

Multi-Media Web Technology Makes Instructional Resources Scaleable: Kathleen Oliver, Cindy Sheffield, Bradley Otterson, Jason Pecsek, Michael Schaefer, Deborah A. McClellan, and Robert Sapp, Welch Medical Library; and Harold Lehmann, Medical Informatics Education and Pediatrics and Biomedical Information Science, School of Medicine; Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Baltimore, Maryland.

A Web-Based Graduate Course in Health Policy: Fostering Lifelong Advocacy, Ethical Consideration, and Legal Awareness: Elizabeth R. Warner, Information Literacy Programs, Academic Information Services and Research (AISR), Scott Memorial Library; and Mary E. Bowen, Department of Nursing, College of Health Professions; Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia.

Are Electronic Reserves an Invitation to a Lawsuit?: Steven Melamut, R.Ph., J.D., Kathrine R. Everett Law Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; and Eric D. Albright, Information and Education Services; and Scott Garrison, Systems Interface Services; Duke University Medical Center Library, Durham, North Carolina.

Tufts Digital Curriculum: Converging Power of a Database and New Technologies: Elizabeth K. Eaton, Ph.D., and Susan Albright, Health Sciences Library, Tufts University, Boston, Massachusetts.

Peer Management: Grabbing the Dragon by the Tail: Gail L. Persily, Informatics Education; Julia K. Kochi, Digital Library Operations; and Janet Cowan, Data Management Services; Library and Center for Knowledge Management, University of California, San Francisco.

Public Health/Health Administration and Nursing and Allied Health Resources Sections and Outreach SIG

Joint Contributed Papers Session: Outreach to Public Health Professionals: Demystifying the Dragon of Population-Based Service

Moderator: Neil Rambo, National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Pacific Northwest Region, University of Washington, Seattle.

Information Services in a Natural Disaster: Customized Public Health Information During and After Hurricane Floyd: James A. Curtis, Martha A. Bedard, Barrie Hayes, Susan Rondon, and MaryBeth Schell, Health Sciences Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Improving Information Skills for Georgia Public Health Information Practice: The PHOENIX Project: Jan H. LaBeause and Roxanne M. Nelson, Medical Library and Peyton Anderson Learning Resources Center, School of Medicine, Mercer University, Macon, Georgia; Sheila Ann Griffin, Foothills Area Health Education Center; Kate Cronin, Georgia Division of Public Health, Atlanta; and Stuart H. Tedders, Ph.D., Department of Community Medicine, School of Medicine, Mercer University, Macon, Georgia.

The Role of Collaborative Partnerships in a Public Health Outreach Project: Patricia Lee, HealthSeek Information Service; Nila Sathe, Library Research; Frances H. Lynch; Sandra A. Martin, Ed. D., Education Services; and Nunzia B. Giuse, M.D.; Eskind Biomedical Library, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee.

Partners in Information Access for Public Health Professionals—the Nevada Experience: Joan S. Zenan, Savitt Medical Library, School of Medicine, University of Nevada, Reno; and Will Townsend, Air Pollution Control, Clark County Health District, Las Vegas, Nevada.

Public Services and Hospital Libraries Sections

Joint Contributed Papers Session: Weaving the Web: Creating and Managing the Web Databases, Effective Design and Management of Information-Rich Databases Accessible on the Web as well as Team Projects

Moderator: Charles J. Greenberg, Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

Consistency Management: The Key to the Successful Large Scale Professional Clinical Digital Library Service Provision: Steven L. MacCall, School of Library and Information Studies, and Ian E. Gibson, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa; and Ana D. Cleveland, Ph.D., School of Library and Information Science, University of North Texas, Denton.

CGI? Not I! Creating Static Web Pages with a Database: Candice Benjes, Norris Medical Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

EdWeb: The Educational Web Server at the Medical University of South Carolina: Elizabeth Connor, Public Services and Education; Robert K. Poyer, Educational Programs and Instructional Development; C. E. Anderson; Nancy McKeehan, Systems; and Thomas G. Basler, Ph.D., Libraries and Learning Resource Centers; Library, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston.

Weaving a Web-Based Point-of-Care, Team-Based Information System (PoinTIS): Suzetta C. Burrows, Kelly M. Moore, and Henry L. Lemkau, Jr., Louis Calder Memorial Library, School of Medicine, University of Miami, Florida.

Databases on the Web as a Public Health Injury and Violence Prevention Tool: Robin Tremblay-McGaw, Trauma Foundation, The Pacific Center for Violence Prevention, and The Bell Campaign, San Francisco; and Denise Bonin, Andornot Consulting, Inc., Vancouver, Canada.

Consumer and Patient Health Information, Hospital Libraries, Nursing and Allied Health Resources, Public Health/Health Administration, and Relevant Issues Sections

Joint Invited Speakers Session: Beyond Health Care: Healthy People in Healthy Communities in a Healthy World

Speaker: Trevor Hancock, M.D., Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto.

Hospital Libraries and Library Management and Leadership Sections

Joint Invited Speakers Session: Collaborating to Create Opportunity: Building and Growing Consortia to Provide Resources

Moderator: Jeanette C. McCray, Arizona Health Sciences Library, The University of Arizona, Tucson.

Collaborating to Build THINCnet: North Carolina Area Health Education Center Digital Library and Resource System: Diana McDuffee, Elizabeth Dain, and Carol G. Jenkins, Health Sciences Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

The Common Good, the Singular Challenge: “Give and Take” in Building and Maintaining a Community Consortium: Julia Sollenberger, Edward G. Miner Library and Medical Informatics, University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, New York.

The Arizona Health Information Network: Collaborating to Provide E-Resources via a Statewide Infrastructure: Jacqueline Donaldson Doyle, Learning Resources and Continuing Medical Education, Banner Health Arizona, Phoenix; and Jeanette C. McCray, Arizona Health Sciences Library, The University of Arizona, Tucson.

Building a Shared Catalog through Collaboration and Cooperation: The Colorado Story: Rosalind F. Dudden, Tucker Memorial Medical Library, National Jewish Medical and Research Center, Denver, Colorado; Margaret Bandy, Exempla St. Joseph Hospital, Denver, Colorado; and Marla M. Graber, Cataloging and Database Management, and Sandy Arnesen, Systems and Databases, Denison Memorial Library, University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, Denver.

Research and Public Services Sections

Joint Invited Speakers Session: Evidence-Based Librarianship: Tools We All Can Use, Part 2

Moderator: Ana D. Cleveland, Ph.D., School of Library and Information Science, Medical Informatics Program, and School of Public Health, University of North Texas, Denton.

Systematic Reviews and Critical Appraisal of the Library Literature: The U.K. Library and Information Co-operation Council (LINC) Health Panel Research Working Party Initiative: Anne Brice, Health Care Unit, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; and Andrew Booth, Information Resources, School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR), University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom.

The Librarian's Role Conducting a Systematic Review: Martha (Molly) Harris, VA Cochrane Center @ San Antonio, South Texas Veterans Health Care System, San Antonio.

Plenary Session III

Demystifying Electronic Publishing: Revelations on the Revolution in Publishing

Introduction: Joanne G. Marshall, Ph.D., School of Library and Information Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Speakers:

Paul Ginsparg, Ph.D., Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico.

Betsy L. Humphreys, Library Operations, Health Services Research Information, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland.

Beginning at noon, The MLA Board of Directors and the CHLA/ABSC Board of Directors held meetings. The Section Council met in the afternoon.

CONFERENCE, MAY 11

The Continuing Education Committee met throughout the day.

Compiled by Steven J. Squires, Proceedings Editor

Health Sciences Library

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill