8:00–9:30 AM CDT /

9:00–10:30 AM EDT

Librarians want to get better at everything they do. . . in their jobs, career planning, and lives, but they often lack an intentional strategy to assess themselves and make plans to improve. Reflective practice fills this need.

No matter the type of librarian you are, your work environment, or how long you’ve been a librarian, bringing intentional reflection to your work and life will benefit you and your library. 

Getting Better at Everything You Do introduces you to a simple model of reflective practice and offers exercises that allow you to practice applying reflection in a variety of situations. By the end of this session, you will be able to apply reflective practice to any aspect of your life you want to improve or change.

After attending this session, you will be able to:

• Explain reflective practice and meta-reflection.
• Apply reflective practices techniques to improve work- and career-related practice.
• Apply meta-reflection to evaluate the effectiveness of reflective practice.

Instructor

Jolene M. Miller, AHIP, is the Director of the Mulford Health Science Library and an Assistant Professor of Library Administration at the University of Toledo. She has worked in medical libraries for over 20 years, as a reference librarian and a library administrator. The complex realities of library administration forced her to look for new ways to manage her workload and develop the knowledge and skills needed for success. Reflective practice provided the time and space needed to develop as an administrator. She is the author of a number of papers, chapters, and presentations on reflective practice.

9:30–10:00 AM CDT /

10:30–11:00 AM EDT

Break

10:00–11:30 AM CDT /

11:00–12:30 PM EDT

Session: Balancing Acts: Personal Health Narratives and Scientific Evidence in the

Information Age

Digital platforms have given rise to a democratization of health storytelling, wherein personal health narratives can be shared widely, offering compelling and intimate firsthand accounts of illness and wellness.  These narratives represent a unique information evaluation challenge, as they can often convey both powerful lived experiences and misleading health information. 

Health librarians who are invested in cultivating lifelong information literacy skills and habits of mind should be prepared to contend with this complex form of misinformation. As such, this session will focus on the overlap of health misinformation and narrative messaging, especially attending to implications for information literacy instruction, and the development of more sophisticated information evaluation practices. 

In this session, participants will explore how personal health narratives can serve as potent vectors for misinformation, while also coming to understand the importance of taking these narratives seriously as sources of health information.  In navigating these tensions and contradictions, participants will begin to develop nuanced information strategies to uphold a commitment to both epistemic justice and evidence-based healthcare.

Presentation slides, as well as a bibliography/resource list will be made available after the session. 

After attending this session, you will be able to:

• Describe the role of personal narratives in spreading health misinformation and describe key characteristics that make these stories compelling and potentially misleading.
• Identify approaches to combat misinformation while balancing epistemic justice and evidence-based healthcare principles.
• Develop strategies to support the evaluation and integration of knowledge from diverse sources to promote a holistic approach to health information literacy.

Instructor

Brynne Campbell Rice, MA, MS, MLIS is an Assistant Curator and Librarian for Health Sciences at New York University.  A former high school chemistry teacher and current nursing librarian, her interests center around evidence-based practice and information literacy in the health sciences, especially issues of credibility, authority, and ways of knowing at the intersections of health equity and health misinformation.

12:30–2:00 PM CDT /

1:30–3:00 PM EDT

Session: Critical Contributions: Developing Research Appraisal Skills at Your Institution

With the reproducibility crisis in biomedical and health sciences and the ever-present necessity of basing medical practice on valid research, medical librarians have an opening to expand their contributions to health care and raise their status by teaching critical appraisal at their institutions. Abraham Wheeler and Amy Blevins aim to get you fired up about teaching in this new area!

You will learn why critical appraisal is an emerging need in health sciences programs, how librarians can fill a gap in critical appraisal expertise, and how you can increase your involvement in the evidence-based medicine (EBM) curriculum at your institution. You will understand the essence of critical appraisal and its place in the cycle of EBM and learn steps that you can take to develop and improve your critical appraisal skills.

By the end of this session, you will be able to:

• identify strategies to increase involvement in your institutions’ curricula.
• explain the value of librarians having the skills to practice and teach critical appraisal.
• describe ways to improve knowledge of critical appraisal concepts.
• describe basic critical appraisal competencies and how to build skills in this area.

Instructors

Abe Wheeler is one of the Health Sciences Librarians at Michigan State University. He is the librarian for the College of Osteopathic Medicine, Program in Public Health Flint Research Group, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Program in Global Health and the Physician Assistant program. His expertise is in Evidence Based Medicine with a particular focus in communicating evidence to patients. He has taught numerous courses on how to critically appraise medical literature utilizing journal clubs as the teaching format. In addition, Abe has expertise in creating tractable research questions, data literacy, and advanced searching techniques.

Amy E. Blevins is the Associate Director for Public Services at the Indiana University School of Medicine’s Ruth Lilly Medical Library and a statewide course director for the medical school’s health systems science course. She is an inaugural facilitator and steering committee member for the Critical Appraisal Institute for Librarians and on the steering committee for the Evidence-Based Practice for Health Sciences: An Introductory Workshop. She received the Medical Library Association’s (MLA) Lucretia W. McClure Excellence in Education Award and the Ida and George Eliot Prize. She received her MALS from the University of Missouri - Columbia and has interests in evidence-based medicine, leadership, and instruction.

2:00–2:30 PM CDT /

3:00–3:30 PM EDT

2:30–4:30 PM CDT /

3:30–5:30 PM EDT

Session: The Joy of Project Management! Managing All Projects, Large and Small

Project management skills are extraordinarily valuable in many ways. They allow you to be more effective in your work and personal life. They demonstrate leadership skills that can help you get promoted and earn you gratitude from everyone on a project you manage.

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

-          Identify when and why you should use project management techniques

-          Assemble a project team that includes the right people in the right roles

-          Break a project into tasks and subtasks, identify dependencies among tasks, and build a detailed project plan

-          Choose among types of tools for managing projects

-          Apply project management skills to managing your own workload

You’ll learn through presentation, examples, discussion, and small group work in which you’ll practice with tools and techniques presented in the course to create a plan for a small project.

You’ll leave the course with the skills and confidence to tackle projects in your work and personal life and recommendations for future study and growth.

Instructors

Janet Crum, MLS is the Dean of Library Services, Fresno State University, with over 25 years of experience managing projects in health sciences and general academic libraries. Her success in leading a complex system migration involving three libraries and difficult institutional politics led directly to a promotion to a department head role, which launched her career in library leadership.

Elisa Cortez, MILS is the Medical Education and Clinical Outreach Librarian at the University of California Riverside. She has over 25 years of experience as a medical librarian that includes work as a product manager, 10 years as head of access services, and the management of projects, large and small. A planner aficionado, she brings her project management skills to her personal and professional life.