MLA is a great group full of interesting and helpful librarians, and even though we aren’t the size of ALA, it is sometimes hard to know the structure, how things work, who does what, etc. within the organization.  So I have decided to continue my unofficial MLA insider posts with an attempt at pulling back the curtain of the organization. 

One note, much of the stuff I will be blogging about is available on the organization’s website, MLANet.org, and available to current members, but I think the best way to really understand is to also get involved.  It is one thing to read and another to do.

I will still continue writing about other things on the blog, but I will throw in an unofficial insider post every once and a while. 

If you didn’t read the MLA 2013 blog, here are links to my posts which will give you an idea of what I intend to write about.

• 2015 NPC Ideas Starts Now -What all happens when planning the annual meeting. Timelines, speakers, programs, selecting a theme, etc.
• What is the Leaders Tea and Who is a Leader? -It isn’t the medical version of Library Journal’s Movers and Shakers, it is a meeting on what you need to do now that you are chair of a Section, Committee, Task Force, etc.
• How Things Get Done in MLA - Basic background of how things happen within the MLA structure.

In the following weeks I plan to write a post about Sections, SIGs, Chapters and other entities within the larger MLA.  My intention is to shed light on what is sometimes a very confusing area for members.  I will be answering the often asked question, “What is a Section and how is it different than a SIG?”

What are some of the things you always wondered about MLA?  Let me know and I will try and shed some light on it.  I need your imput and questions to help make this unofficial insider series work

The organization is very rough.  I tried to group like posts on the same topic together, but I am sure I made some mistakes.  I also added some extra details such as the section program title on some of the blog titles where it wasn’t immediately obvious as to what it referred to. 

One thing to remember…. The e-Conference stuff is not just for those who paid for the e-Conference.  Those who physically attended the conference can also access all of the great stuff online using their badge number.

Prior to a conference

• Getting connected when you are the newbie
• Don’t Miss the Colleague Connection
• Colleague Connection
• Mapping out a Conference Itinerary
• Keep your Conference Momentum
• Why come to an MLA Annual meeting?
• Get your backchannel on at #MLAnet13

About MLA and Getting Involved

• 2015 NPC Ideas Starts Now
• What is the Leaders Tea and Who is a Leader?
• How Things Get Done in MLA
• What are you looking for from MLA?

CE’s

• CE Session: Beyond Powerpoint: Leveraging Technology to Enhance Instruction and Learning
• Why teach a CE class?
• CE 503 Session: Emerging Technologies for Librarians
• The Power of Libraries to Reduce Disaster Impact and Speed Recovery
• CE601 Beyond PowerPoint: Leveraging Technology to Enhance Instruction and Learning

Sunrise Seminars

• Discovery Services Helpful for Finding Content, but Don’t Minimize Time We Need to Spend on Search Strategy and Info Literacy Instruction

Plenary Sessions

• A Year of Positive Energy (Plenary 1)
• The Role of Communication in Librarianship and One Health
• MLA Conference – Sunday Morning Speaker
• The Value of the Non-Librarian Perspective: Thoughts on Plenary 2
• What We Can Learn from the Accidental Journalist
• The Threat of Pandemics, Not to Mention Fear and Panic (Plenary 4)
• Sheila Davis and Laurie Garrett: Major Speakers on the Last Day of the Conference

Exhibitors

• MLA 2013 First Time Exhibitors
• Publishing Innovations
• More Than Free Goodies
• Items of Interest in the Exhibit Hall

Section & Sig Stuff

• History of Health Sciences Section Spotlight
• Informationist SIG
• Clinical Librarians & EBHC SIG Meeting – 2pm Sunday 5th May
• Hospital Libraries Section Activities Sunday with a Glimpse at Monday
• A Special Birthday Celebration for the Hospital Libraries Section
• Public Services Section Meeting
• International Cooperation Section (ICS) Business Meeting

Posters

• Poster Session 1
• Poster Session 1 – Posters That Attract Attention
• Poster Session 1 – A Few More to Check Out
• Poster Session 2 – Monday, May 6
• Poster Session 2: “Partnering for Value”
• Poster Session 2: The learning curve for One Health blogging
• Poster Session 3
• Poster Session 4

Programs

• Online Proceedings Now Open
• One Health One World -Surveying Current One Health Initiatives
• Catching the Welch Medical Library Timeline
• Doing Things Differently: Informationists at the Welch Medical Library
• Order, please: taming the Web with semantics
• Integrating our expertise -Integrating Our Expertise: Engaging Our Partners in Resources at the Bench or at the Point of Care Session
• Quality Assurance -Quality Assurance for Clinical Librarians, Informationists and Embedded Librarians
• Get organized… and save the time of the reader -Leading by Design, Not Default: Focused Direction in Support of the User
• EMTS Session Recap — One World: Online Education 
• The Role of Librarians in EBM: part 2
• Education and Media Technologies Section (Program Section II)
• Lots of carots and sticks, and things with teeth -Librarian’s Role in Systematic Reviews, and Global Data Sharing to Advance Science and Enviornmental Aspects of Global Health
• A Few Highlights FromThe International Clinical Librarian Conference
• Librarians on Animal Use Committees
• An Irish Perspective-Informing future roles through research: a national approach
• Data Management? Yeah, we got that.
• Final Thoughts - Education and Media: Creative Advice from the Media Experts
• ICLC 1: Quality Assurance for Clinical Librarians, Informationists, and Embedded Librarians
• The Impact of the Clinical Informationist -ICLC1 : Quality Assurance for Clinical Librarians, Informationists and Embedded Librarians
• ICLC 2: Emerging Roles for Health Librarians and Finding New Information in Novel Places
• ICLC 3: Practicalities of Searching for Clinical Librarians, Informationists, and Embedded Librarians
• Practicalities of Searching -International Clinical Librarian Conference 3: Practicalities of Searching for Clinical Librarians, Informationists, and Embedded Librarian
• Healthcare Information for All by 2015 (HIFA2015)
• Open Access Presentations - Open Access in Action: Trends, Policies, and Institutional Activities in Support of Open Information
• Structuring Our Services for the Future in Health Care
• Altmetrics and Scholarly Communication- Altmetrics and Revolutions: Web-Native Science and the Future of Scholarly Communication
• Collaboration for Patient-Centered Informed Consents -Pharmacy and Drug Information Section and Leadership and Management Section:Enabling and Enriching Transnational and Interprofessional Collaboration

NLM Stuff

• News from the NLM Booth
• NLM News: Sunday Poster Sessions
• NLM DOCLINE Users Group
• NLM implements the new Library Dark Art, RDA is here!
• NLM Update – my favorite part of MLA
• NLM Update in a Nutshell

Other things

• A taste from afar: reports from ICML and the international experience
• International Visitor’s Reception
• Flipping the MLA Conference

After Conference and the e-Conference

• I’m attending MLA 2013 – I’m just not in Boston!
• Watch and listen to yesterday’s Plenary Sessions
• Thank Goodness They Are Taping This
• New content now available for e-conference
• Audio and slides now available for most sessions
• Don’t worry – you can still access MLA ’13 online proceedings long after the meeting has ended

I will be writing as the “Unofficial MLA Insider.” What does this mean?  Well it is a blogging title that I made up and pitched to Kate and she thought it would be a good idea. 

Bascially this is my idea of what my title and what types of posts I will be writing:

I am not an MLA newbie and while I am technically distinguished with 10+ yrs of MLA-ness, I certainly don’t feel like I’ve been around that long.  I feel like somebody who is in the thick of their career and involvement within MLA.  I feel like somebody who is active and wants to be more active and help get others active as well.   I know when I first decided to get involved (way after my newbie years) I didn’t know how to do it and how things were done within MLA.  Everything seemed to be a great mystery to me.  As the “Unofficial MLA Insider” I will be blogging about how things work at MLA so that if you are interested in getting involved you have a better understanding of what is going on. 

So if you are interested in my posts or that of other MLA bloggers, please check out the MLA’13 Conference Blog. For the couple of days I will be posting there as well as tweeting using the hashtag #mlanet13.

(from MEDLIB-L listserve) 

In the wake of the Boston Marathon tragedy, Montie’ Dobbins and Bart Ragon want to raise money to help support the victims and families affected by the events that occurred on April 15, 2013. During the conference they are going to attempt to run a total of 26.2 miles. This roughly works out to be 5-6 miles a day. For those members who are interested, They are for a donation of $1 for every mile they run. If they accomplish their goal, this means that the total donation would be $26.20. Donations would be made to The One Fund, a charity set up by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Boston Mayor Tom Menino. Donations are on the honor system and you make your donation directly to the charity. They will not collect any money or track donations. They will send an e-mail at the end of conference to those who choose to participate with an update on the total miles ran. During the conference they will provide updates via Twitter, including maps of their route. They are currently working out a running schedule and if you would like to run some or all of the runs, please indicate below. They plan to run a slooooooooow pace (10-12 min miles).

For more information about the charity please see www.onefundboston.org

 To register go to http://t.co/eljJqzZ2sX 

 Questions can be sent to bart(atsign)virginia(dot-thingy)edu.

 Thank you for your consideration. We know that Boston is going to be an excellent host city for our conference!

The Affordable Care Act has changed the way hospitals are reimbursed for medicare patients. In the past hospitals made more money off of patients who were readmitted for things they were orginally discharged with. Now, they are penalized for readmissions happening within 1 month of discharge for certain conditions. This means that a lot of hospitals are going to be seeing losses of millions of dollars.

Where does the library stand in the face of these losses when technology has changed the way we search for things and users often search Google before asking a librarian. The librarian needs to get lean and mean and start operating his/her library like a hospital department that is responsible for achieving the specific goals of the hospital. So if the hospital’s goal is to reduce readmissions by x% then the librarian needs to figure out specifically how the library can help the hospital do that. (If your answer is I can give them more literature searches, then think again because that won’t help you keep your job because administrators think they can do that already.)

This tweet chat will discuss the various ways librarians can specifically show their worth to their own administration instead of passivley pointing to some standard or study illustrating the need for a hospital library. We will be discussing ideas of what we can do to answer our administration’s always constant question “What have you done for me lately and why should I give you money instead of another department?” The game has changed and we need to change our strategy.

If you are new to Twitter or the idea of tweet chats then I highly recommend participating using the website http://www.tweetchat.com.  Login to the site using your Twitter username and password then type in the word medlibs into the box at the top of the page next to the go button.  You will be able to follow the discussion very easily and you won’t have to worry about adding #medlibs to every post because it already does that for you. For more information about tweet chats check out this quick guide.

Colleague Connection is MLA’s mentoring program that pairs newer members or first-time meeting attendees with returning, more experienced members during the annual meeting. The purpose of Colleague Connection is to introduce new attendees to the association and help them get the most out of the MLA annual meeting.

Sign up to be a mentor today: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KZBMKD7!

I was a mentor a few times and I can say that it was a great experience.  Each time I met a new person that had different and fresh ideas that I loved hearing about.

MLA is only 2 weeks away…. click on the link now and be a mentor.

The researchers hope to receive responses from public libraries, academic institutions, hospitals and not-for-profit organizations involved in consumer health information services.  The goal is to identify what services are currently offered, who is offering them and how often. 

The data may be able to assist other organizations in implementing new consumer health information services.  Organizations that participate will be entered for a drawing to win one of two $300 checks. After the survey period, 53 randomly chosen hospital librarians that complete the follow-up survey will receive $10 for their time and effort. 

This research is possible through financial support from the Hospital Libraries Section of the Medical Library Association. The survey will be open from April 15, 2013 to April 30, 2013 at 11:45 pm Pacific time. If you are willing to participate, please go to https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/2012_CHISS.

This email conversation is very timely.  It turns out this week I will be in Tulsa, OK teaching the class, “The Evolving Librarian: Responding to changes in the workplace and in healthcare.”  Technology changes, social changes and healthcare changes have forced hospital librarians to step back and really change the way we do things.

Personally, we hospital librarians need to start treating our library like a hospital department and not a library.  I mentioned this in my medlib-l post. I know this statment sounds odd because you might think we do that already.  I think we could do better.  I think librarians not only need to align their goals to the hospitals, but they need to make the hospital’s goals their goals.

With the Affordable Care Act, hospitals stand to lose 1% of their Medicare payments in penalties if patients with specific conditions are readmitted within 1 month of discharge.  By 2015 it will be 3%.  That is billions of dollars.  To put it in perspective, Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis will lose $2 million dollars according to Kaiser Health News. Dr. John Lynch the chief medical officer of Barnes-Jewish says they could absorb the loss this year but not over time if penalties continue to accumulate.

You better believe all of the other hospital departments in your hospital are working toward the hospital goals.  Aligning the library to demonstrate specifically (hard numbers) how it can help the hospital achieve their goals is essential.

I thought long and hard about my post to medlib-l before I sent it.  The reason was I didn’t want to lay blame for hospital libraries closing on the librarians.  I didn’t want to imply that they weren’t doing their jobs or that if they “could’a, would’a, should’a” they would still have their jobs.  That wasn’t my intent.  Although, one person responded on the list saying they found it “disheartening that sometimes when a library staff is downsized or actually closed, that a too common belief is that if  only ‘that library’ had been doing more, building a stronger case, demonstrating their worth in concrete ways, etc., etc., this would not have happened.”

Who knows what the situations were at those hospital library closures or downsizings?  However, I firmly believe if you don’t start looking at your library as a business arm of the hospital and align your goals to support the hospital achieve its goals, then you are going to have a very rough time.  Because if an institution as established and good as Barnes-Jewish is dealing with these things, then it can, and is happening everywhere.  Where do you think the library stands when the institution has to deal with a $2 million dollar loss one year? Repeatedly?  Where do you think it stands if you do not illustrate exactly with hard numbers how your department has helped prevent that loss.

I think everyone (administrators, doctors, nurses, etc.) can agree that the idea of a library is good.  But when faced with money demands, that idea  needs concrete specific support.  That support must be generated from within.  Administration doesn’t care about the library in terms of JCAHO standards. Administration doesn’t care about the Rochester study or newer updated similar published research.  Administration cares about what your library is doing now.  Those studies, standards, etc. aren’t going to change your administration’s mind, you are.  They don’t care if you give them every flipping article under God’s green earth saying that a library will save them money and help them cure every disease known to man.  Administration only cares about you, your library, what you are doing, and how it benefits them.

I am not alone in thinking that hospital librarians need to change they way they think and do “library business.”  The Mid Atlantic Region will be running a CE webinar series starting May 31, 2013, entitled “Running Your Hospital Like a Business.”  Some of the things the series will address are: writing a business plan, art of negotiation, and proving your worth/adding to your value.  All of these things are those business skills that I ran away from in college but now am kicking myself as I realize I really need them today and could’a, should’a taken a business class back then.

Oh well, time to beef up now.

Before you head off to Boston, drop an extra pack of dental floss in your bag.  In honor of the Dental Section’s 80th Anniversary (impressive) they will be collecting dental floss for needy populations in Guatemala and Mexico.  Dental students from Boston University go on mssions to these areas to provide treatement and according to organizers their is a scarcity of floss (compared to other oral hygiene products) there.  There will be a donation box at the conference registration desk.

Floss is so small you can probably pack a couple of packs in your carry on.  Don’t forget!!!!

I used Google Calendar synced to my iPhone.  I have synced Google Calendar to Androids and the practice is pretty much the same.  I don’t sync to my Outlook calendar, so I can’t help you there. If somebody wants to comment on how they did it in Outlook and any problems/tricks they found, that would be helpful.

I signed into the scheduler using my Facebook.  I admit I did it because I am lazy and didn’t want to try and remember another ID and password for a one time event, plus it is kind of nice seeing my picture and other librarian pictures next to events.

I clicked the star for every event I plan to attend.  I found information (abstracts or other details) on most of the events if I hovered over them.  Those that didn’t have abstracts when I hovered, included a link for me to get more information.  I discovered there is no way to add events that are not on the official MLA Scheduling Tool.  The only way I have been able to do this is to put the added event into my Google Calendar.

Speaking of Google Calendar and exporting.  I clicked on the Facebook and Twitter icons to see what exporting would happen.  Facebook did nothing, it didn’t post to my timeline or anything.  Clicking on the Twitter badge sends out a generic tweet for people to check the scheduler with a link to the scheduler.  (Both the Facebook icon and Twitter icon are kind of useless IMHO.)  Clicking on the phone icon gives me the option to use their mobile web app to view your schedule or to download your schedule into iCal for Google Calendar, Outlook and Apple iCal. 

I downloaded it for Google Calendar to my KraftyLibrarian Google account.  (I have a personal Google Calendar with my entire family life on it and I don’t want my MLA schedule cluttering the family calendar and vice versa.)  The import goes fairly easily, but it Google treats the scheduler calendar as a imported calendar that you can’t edit.  So if you want to add any events you have to add them to your home calendar (in my case KraftyLibrarian calendar) and they will show up in a different color and under that calendar. 

Because it is an imported calendar you will also have to sync it to your mobile device’s calendar. If you are following multiple calendars then make sure you scroll down for the link to syncing multiple calendars.  https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/151674?hl=en&ref_topic=13950. Thank you @dearbeth on Twitter for the link to syncing it to my phone.

Once I was able to sync it to my phone I was able to see everything I needed and add additional MLA personal events (to the non-mla calendar) to show up on on my phone’s calendar to keep me on track for the meeting. 

Anybody else have any tips or tricks?