Making the best use of medical librarians

A nice little piece in the September 16, 2006, issue of BMJ Career Focus on how librarians fit with EBM, what exactly they do, and how to ask for their assistance.

Research from practice

Need a little fodder for your promotion bid this year? Need to justify your budget? Always wanted to see your name in print? Evaluate your services. Measure your impact. Start planning ahead now to make a paper or poster presentation at an upcoming conference.

If you have an idea related to evidence-based practice, EBP curricula and outreach, expert searching, or other topics of interest to librarians in the FPIN community, let us help! I am personally more than happy to listen to and provide feedback about research proposals, drafts of poster/paper abstracts, or that project idea that is just now taking form. And if you're looking for a colleague with a mutual interest, draw on our community--that's the whole point of having a community!

Let me know if I can help, and in the meanwhile, here are a few dates and conference topics to get you thinking . . .

ACRL 2006
March 29 to April 1, 2007 in Baltimore, MD
Submission Deadline (for posters): October 20, 2006
"Conference programs will examine the six conference tracks: Attracting and Thriving; Collaborations; Content, Collections, and Access; The Environment for Libraries; Libraries and the Imagination; and Teaching and Learning, and conference themes" Additional information online.


MLA 2007
May 19 to 23, 2007 in Philadelphia, PA
Submission Deadline: November 6, 2006
"The [National Program Committee] encourages papers and posters that highlight the vision, the struggle, and the means by which health sciences librarians can harness today's powerful information environment to promote access to health care information." Additional information online.


4th International Conference on Evidence-Based Library and Information Practice
May 6 to 9, 2007 in Chapel Hill, NC
Submission Deadline: December 1, 2006
"EBLIP4 invites submissions for contributed papers and posters including both original research and innovative applications of EBLIP in library and information management. Papers that deal with library support of evidence-based practice in other fields such as health, social work and public policy are also welcome. Additional info may be found at www.eblip4.unc.edu."


SLA 2007
June 3 to 6, 2007 in Denver, CO
Submission Deadline: December 8, 2006
"Topics of the papers should be related to library science, information management, research or other issues related to the work of special libraries. Abstracts will be judged on substance, potential member interest, and relevance to the conference theme (Climbing to New Heights) or to the SLA tag line (Connecting People and Information)." Additional information online.

FPIN librarians at MLA Chapter meetings

Going to the annual meeting of the Midwest or Midcontinental chapters of MLA? Be sure to say hello!

I will be attending the Midwest chapter meeting in Louisville, KY, October 7-11. And attending the Midcontinental meeting (Oct. 10-13 in St. Louis) will be two more familiar FPIN librarian faces: Deb Ward, our FPIN VP for Information Resources, and Susan Meadows, member of the FPIN Librarian Team and former Team Leader, both from the University of Missouri-Columbia. In both places we'll have an encore presentation of the poster submitted by the FPIN Librarian Team at MLA '06; if you didn't have a chance to see it then, here's your chance to learn more about the FPIN search filters.

Each of us is looking forward to meeting up with colleagues new and old. We have plenty of things to discuss about our "day jobs" and . . gasp . . . our lives outside the library, but if you have questions or comments about your experience in FPIN, be sure to take advantage of this time to share those as well! If you miss me at the poster session, just look by the coffee service--I've never met a cup I didn't like :-)

Evidence-Based Practice indexed by Elsevier

Many of you may be familiar with Evidence-Based Practice (EBP), a monthly publication from the FPIN network. What you may not know is that as of this year, articles from EBP are being indexed by Elsevier and included in Scopus. For those of you who aren't familiar with the publication, EBP takes an independent look at best-available evidence for primary care practice, and also includes a patient education piece (co-authored by an FPIN librarian, Jean Blackwell) that each month translates one popular Clinical Inquiry topic into lay terms. The evidence-based patient handouts are freely available from the FPIN website. The online archive of EBP is available to subscribers.

If there are physicians at your institution who are EBP readers, please be sure to take advantage of your FPIN membership for a subscription discount! (The same holds true for PEPID PCP, a hand-held and online point-of-care resource that includes evidence-based content from FPIN).