October 11-13th, 2023

Keynote Speaker:

Kayte Spector-Bagdady,

JD, MBe

Photo Credit: Bryan McCullough,

Michigan Medicine Communications

Data Sharing for Justice

Thursday, October 12th, 8:45am-9:45am Central Time

Large-scale collections of health data and biospecimens allow researchers to analyze correlations among genetic variants, behavior, environment, and outcomes to improve population health. But the data sets needed to support such efforts often fail to reflect the demographic distribution of disease. The disconnect between the diversity of research participants and the overall US clinical population can lead to misleading results, incorrect diagnoses, or findings that are not socially contextualized for historically excluded patients. This talk explores the current state of data sharing regulation that has allowed this to happen, complex patient response, and will make practical suggestions for moving forward.

About Kayte Spector-Bagdady, JD, MBe

Co-Director, Center for Bioethics & Social Sciences in Medicine

University of Michigan Medical School

Kayte Spector-Bagdady is a lawyer bioethicist who is an Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Co-Director at the Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine and at the University of Michigan Medical School. She teaches the Responsible Conduct of Research as well as Research Ethics and the Law and is an Associate Editor of the American Journal of Bioethics.

The overarching goal of Prof. Spector’s work is improving the governance of secondary research with health data and specimens. She has brought in almost $3M in funding as PI of a National Human Genome Research Institute K01 and a National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences R01 to accomplish those goals. Her recent articles have been published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Science, JAMA, and Nature Medicine, and her research or expertise has appeared in the NY Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, TIME, and CNN.

Professor Spector was an Associate Director for President Obama’s Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, and is a former Board Member of the American Society for Bioethics & Humanities and practicing FDA law attorney. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and School of Medicine.

Plenary Speaker:

Alexandre Amar-Zifkin,

BA, MLIS

Exploring impacts of automated indexing on completeness of MeSH terms

Friday, October 13th, 10:00am-11:00am Central Time

The use of controlled vocabulary to identify relevant articles is a central element of bibliographic database instruction in health sciences. Learners are taught that searching with MeSH yields precise results, and that MeSH increases an article's findability and reliably describes an article's contents. Indexing for MEDLINE - the application of MeSH to records - was done completely by human indexers until 2011. Since April 2022, MeSH are assigned via automated, algorithmic indexing (AI). MeSH assigned by AI are based on terms in title, abstract, and terms and indexing of 'neighbouring', related records, with human review and curation of results as appropriate. We ask: how well does AI identify key concepts of an article and represent them in MeSH?
We reviewed a sample of automated records from early 2023 to determine whether their main concepts were adequately represented with MeSH. We identify some challenges faced by the algorithm, and discuss some ways to search around them.

About Alexandre Amar-Zifkin, BA, MLIS

Librarian

University of Montreal (Université de Montréal)

Alexandre Amar-Zifkin is the librarian for Vision Sciences, Neurosciences and Dentistry at the University of Montreal. From 2013-2022 he was a librarian at the McGill University Health Centre, primarily serving the Montreal Neurological Hospital (with stints at the Allan Memorial, Montreal Children's Hospital and Montreal General Hospital.) Alex has taught many literature searching and citation managing workshops, and is a co-author on several knowledge synthesis papers. This research was performed in collaboration with Taline Ekmekjian, Virginie Paquet, and Tara Landry.

Linda Walton, MLS, FMLA

NNLM Update

Thursday October 12th, 1:15-2PM NNLM/RML Update: Regions 1, 4 and 6

About Linda Walton, MLS, FMLA

Senior Librarian

University of Iowa

Linda Walton is the Principal Investigator and Director of the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) Region 6 which covers Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin. Previously she was the Associate University Librarian for the University of Iowa for collections, research, and education. She served as the director of the Hardin Library for Health Sciences at the University of Iowa, and she was also the associate director of the Galter Health Sciences Library at Northwestern University. Her first health sciences library position was the Library Director for Butler Hospital in Providence, RI. Ms. Walton received her MLS and BA from Indiana University.

Ms. Walton has held many positions for the Medical Library Association including President of the Association in 2015. Other positions include Treasurer, Board member and she has chaired several committees, sections, and juries. She is a Fellow of the Medical Library Association and recently received the Marcia C. Noyes award for Outstanding Achievements in the Field of Health Sciences Librarianship.

Amy Blevins, MALS

MLA Update

Friday, October 13th, 2:15-3PM

About Amy Blevins, MALS

Associate Director for Public Services

Indiana University School of Medicine

Amy Blevins is the current Medical Library Association (MLA) President (2023 - 2024), and she is the Associate Director for Public Services at the Ruth Lilly Medical Library at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, IN. Amy has been a member of the Midwest Chapter since 2010, and was previously part of the Mid-Atlantic Chapter (2006 - 2010). She is a strong advocate for evidence-based medicine and creating curriculum integrated sessions that teach students the skills they need to be successful lifelong learners.