Contents:
From the Chair
Welcome to another year in the Public Health / Health Administration Libraries Section! An update of some the section's activities follows:
Section Activities
Chair's Activities
Future Activities
We are having a productive year, and I would like to thank everyone for their hard work and support. I hope that you have found the email list for the group a useful venue for information exchange. Please feel free to contact me or any of the other section officers if you have any questions or concerns regarding the section. We want to make this section as useful for you as possible. I look forward to continuing to meet the needs of our members. Best wishes for 1999!
Jean Chung
Section Chair
It's time to think about how you could become more active in PH/HA section affairs. Involvement as a section officer is a great way to make a difference--in our programming, our projects, our future directions.
Please volunteer to be a candidate for a position that would interest you, or suggest a colleague who you think would be interested in taking a leadership role.
Candidates are needed for the following positions:
Chair Elect
Archivist
Section Council Representative
Web/Newsletter Editor
Membership Committee Chair
Email: betty.cohen@yale.edu
Through presentations by an invited speaker and contributed papers, it is anticipated that the audience will become more aware of current research in this area and of outreach services and interventional information efforts to youth, families, and affected communities.
With the increasing trend towards globalization, global health concerns such as infectious disease control, disaster preparedness, food-borne illness containment, environmental toxins control, and stockpiling of vaccines are rapidly emerging. The Institute of Medicine released its 1997 report called “America's vital interest in global health", which indicated the need to develop a global health strategy to benefit the entire international community. Papers will address projects involving information retrieval or dissemination in these areas.
The Biomedical and Life Sciences Division of the Special Libraries Association has announced a new award: The Winifred Sewell Prize for Innovation in Information Technologies in Biomedical and Life Sciences Librarianship. The prize is named in honor of PH/HA member Winifred Sewell, who, among other accomplishments, will serve as Honorary President of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy in its 100th anniversary year in 1999-2000. Win is the first woman and the first librarian to be so honored. Our congratulations to her!
(Source: e-mail from Paula Raimondo, Center for Indoor Air Research at ciar@class.org to the Mid Atlantic Chapter of the Medical Library Association.)
Several members of the PH/HA Section of MLA are working with representatives from the Partners in Information Access for Public Health Professionals Steering Committee to identify and assess training efforts by health sciences libraries and related organizations targeted toward both librarians and public health professionals as part of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) efforts to build on existing programs and expand training in the area of public health resources. In addition to CDC and NLM, the Partners initiative is comprised of other government agencies including HRSA (Health Resources and Services Administration), ASTHO (Association of State and Territorial Health Officials), NACCHO (National Association of County and City Health Officials), and NN/LM (National Network of Libraries of Medicine).
Members of the Public Health Training Subcommittee are Nancy Allee, Chair; Sandra Bonzo; Kris Markovich; Ron Merrill; Karyn Pomerantz; Catherine Selden; and Virginia (Ginny) Tanji.
The subcommittee’s charge includes the following agenda:
1) Identify existing training courses/programs within the NN/LM which are either specifically designed to focus on training health sciences librarians in public health resources, or can be adapted to focus on training health sciences librarians. Specifically, the subcommittee is expected to determine the following for existing courses/programs:
a) course
b) scope of the training
c) contents of the training
d) specific public health resources covered
e) prerequisites
f) evaluation component
g) target audience
h) mechanisms/approaches used for delivering the training
i) materials used
j) continuing education credits
k) length of training
l) frequency of updating.
2) Identify individuals with the expertise to provide training in public health resources for health sciences librarians and determine their availability to provide instruction.
3) Make recommendations as to:
a) implementation strategies (how the steering committee should proceed).
b) methods to make training available to NN/LM network members.
c) timeline to initiate training.
d) collaborations.
The subcommittee has contacted RML (Regional Medical Libraries), MEDLIB, and PH/HA email groups to inquire about existing training efforts. Information has been received from over 25 libraries and organizations.
More information about the Partners initiative and the Public Health Training Subcommittee is available at http://www.nnlm.nlm.nih.gov/partners/.
Epidemiology 411: Research Resources in Epidemiology is a ten week graduate course with lecture and discussion in the UCLA School of Public Health. The course covers instruction and practical experience in the use of online article and book databases, navigating the Internet, building reference files, and presentation of research findings for publication. The course is taught by three instructors: Anne Coulson, faculty in the UCLA School of Public Health, Kay Deeney and Alan Carr, reference librarians at the UCLA Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library.
The syllabus is available at:
http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/biomed/epi411/For more information, contact:
Kay Deeney