Call for Southern Chapter Officer Nominations

The SC/MLA Nominating Committee is soliciting nominations and/or self-nominations for Program Chair-Elect, Secretary/Treasurer, and the MLA Nominating Committee Potential Candidate. More information on duties for each position can be found in Article IV of the SC/MLA bylaws. Please consider nominating yourself or someone else for one of these positions!

For nominations, or self-nominations, of Southern Chapter officers, please remember that all candidates should be regular members of MLA as well as current members of Southern Chapter/MLA. Candidates should also be considered based on at least two of the criteria described for each office.

The criteria for each position can be found on the SC/MLA website. Please take a look at the criteria and consider nominating or self-nominating a colleague for one of these positions.

Please send recommendations to Richard Nollan, Nominating Committee Chair, at rnollan@uthsc.edu. Please contact him with any questions. 

Tour BMW During the SC/MLA Annual Meeting

Do you have a need for speed? Then tour the BMW facility while you are at the SC/MLA Annual Meeting this fall. BMW's only U.S. manufacturing facility is located in Greer, SC, about 15 miles from downtown Greenville. The on-site Zentrum Museum, where Greenville hosted the Welcome Reception for the 1999 meeting, is closed for renovation. However, limited tours of the manufacturing plant are available, and seeing this plant in action is definitely worthy of your time.

BMW tours are offered Monday through Friday, and take about two hours. Tours are scheduled two months in advance so call by early August. To schedule a tour, call Katie Smith at 888-TOUR-BMW (868-7269), ext. 2 (Monday-Friday, 9:00 am-2:00 pm).

Reminder: Honorary Membership and T. Mark Hodges Awards Deadline

Don’t forget to apply or nominate a colleague for the Honorary Membership award and T. Mark Hodges Outstanding Service award! The deadline has been extended to April 10. Please submit nominations to the Chair of the Honors & Awards Committee.

As a reminder, the Honorary Membership award recognizes a retired member for significant and consistent contributions to the Southern Chapter or to the profession. More details can be found on the SC/MLA website.

The T. Mark Hodges Outstanding Award is a great way to recognize yourself or a colleague for exceptional service in SC/MLA. The recipient must have been a member of SC/MLA for at least 10 years and demonstrated service of lasting importance. For more information, please visit the T. Mark Hodges Outstanding Service Award page.

And remember, the deadline has been extended to April 10! 

Reflections from an LIS Student Award Recipient

By Alexandria Quesenberry

Thinking about applying for the Library & Information Science (LIS) Student Award? Alexandria Quesenberry (last year's recipient) shares what attending the annual meeting in Puerto Rico meant to her.

Even nearly six months after the conference, I still feel so grateful to have received one of the LIS Student Awards from Southern Chapter. My experience at the annual SC/MLA meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico was unforgettable. 

As soon as I found out I was one of the lucky award recipients, I knew that my main goal for this conference would be networking. SC/MLA is known for being a very active chapter and there are plenty of information professionals that you can network with. For students, you know how important networking can be because you’ll make connections and learn new insights about the field.

Every year, the conference has a theme. One of the themes for this year, Community, seems especially apt for this chapter because all of the members are so friendly and welcoming. If you are nervous about attending a professional conference as a student, don’t be! Everyone that I spoke with seemed genuinely interested in my poster, my position at work, and my plans after graduation. I cannot express how valuable I found the New Member/Student Meeting hosted by Kim Meeks and her committee. If you attend the 2017 conference as a new member and/or student, please go to this meeting! The meeting gave me a chance to meet both new and experienced Southern Chapter librarians who shared their stories and advice.

Heather Holmes Joins MUSC

The Medical University of South Carolina’s Department of Library Science & Informatics is pleased to welcome Heather Holmes to its faculty. 

Heather became the Associate Director for the Libraries in February 2016.  In this position, Heather is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the Library, including supervision of a diverse staff of librarians, technologists, and support staff in areas including research & education, evidence-based practice, resources/collections, and learning commons. Heather joins us from Summa Health System's Akron City and St. Thomas Hospitals in Akron, OH where she was a Clinical Informationist. She received her Master of Library and Information Science degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1998. She has presented at several international meetings including MLA and the Alliance for Continuing Medical Education (ACME) and was invited to the International Congress on Medical Librarianship (ICML) in Brisbane, Australia, in 2009. Holmes is a 2010 recipient of the National Library of Medicine's biomedical informatics fellowship held in Woods Hole, MA, as well as one of Library Journal's Movers & Shakers for 2011. She is also a Distinguished Member of the Academy of Health Information Professionals (AHIP) and the 2014 recipient of the Medical Library Association’s Lois Ann Colaianni Award for Excellence and Achievement in Hospital Librarianship.

Congratulations, MLA Award Recipients!

Several Southern Chapter members received 2016 MLA awards. Please congratulate these members on their hard work and dedication to the field of health sciences librarianship. Those attending the annual MLA meeting can honor recipients at the Presidents’ Awards Dinner on Tuesday, May 17, starting at 6:30 pm.

President’s Award

Brenda L. Seago, Greenblatt Library, Georgia Regents University–Augusta

In recognition of outstanding work implementing the new way of selecting and providing programming for Mosaic ’16

Rising Stars 2016–2017

Tony Nguyen, AHIP, National Network of Libraries of Medicine Southeastern/Atlantic Region, Health Sciences & Human Services Library, University of Maryland–Baltimore

Gregg A. Stevens, AHIP, Pharmacy and Health Professions, Monroe F. Swilley, Jr. Library, Mercer University, Atlanta, GA

EBSCO/MLA Annual Meeting Grants

Elizabeth G. Hinton, AHIP, Rowland Medical Library, University of Mississippi Medical Center–Jackson 

Upcoming Learning Opportunities

By Emily Brennan, MLIS, MUSC Library, Charleston, SC

Librarians love to learn, so here is a list of upcoming training opportunities that will help you brush up on old skills and learn new ones!

NN/LM Online Training Opportunities:

• March 21-April 29: ABCs of DNA: Unraveling the Mystery of Genetics Information for Consumers.
• March 25-April 25: Combatting Information Fatigue: Health Information Resources for Veterans.
• March 28-April 22: Super Searcher/Enhancing Your Online Search Super Powers.

NN/LM Webinars:

• March 18: GMR Tech Talks: Social Media Integration with RSS 2.0.
• April 12: Boost Box: Underneath It All: Archives in Medical Libraries.

MLA Webinar:

• March 8: The Consumer Health Library: A Site for Service, Education, and Hope.

Please share learning opportunities with your colleagues in the comments section!

Emily Brennan, MLIS, is a Research and Education Librarian at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) Library, and when not working, loves spending time with her two children and chihuahua.

Honorary Membership and T. Mark Hodges Awards

It’s Honors and Awards season, and SC/MLA would like to recognize our exceptional members! The first two awards with upcoming deadlines (April 1) are Honorary Membership and the T. Mark Hodges Outstanding Service Award. As of this post, no one has applied for either of these so please apply or nominate a colleague! Only good can come to those that apply! Submit nominations to the Chair of the Honors & Awards Committee.

The Honorary Membership award recognizes a retired member for significant and consistent contributions to the Southern Chapter or to the profession. Significant contributions to the chapter may be defined as serving in elected or appointed offices, on chapter committees, or in developing chapter meetings. Significant contributions to the profession may be at the local, chapter, regional, or national level. The winner will be approved during the SC/MLA Executive Committee meeting at the MLA Annual Meeting. More details about Honorary Membership criteria are on the SC/MLA website.

Do you know someone who has been an SC/MLA member for at least 10 years and has illustrated dedicated and continuing service to the association? Is there someone you know who has made a lasting impact in the association? Then please consider nominating them (or yourself) for the T. Mark Hodges Outstanding Service Award! The purpose of this award is to honor the memory of T. Mark Hodges and to recognize a chapter member whose service to the chapter and profession have been exceptional and of lasting importance. The awards recipient will be announced at the SC/MLA Annual Meeting, and presented with a plaque and $250. For information on the nominating process, please go to the SC/MLA website.

Please apply or nominate a colleague for one of these two distinguished awards by April 1! 

Essential Apps for the Medical Mobile Tech Novice

Photo by stockmedia.cc/CC BY 3.0

By Ariel Pomputius, MLIS, University of Florida    

Every month, on the second Wednesday of the month, the blog team would like to talk Tech. While I promise that we will try our hardest to cover as wide a range of technology as possible, I feel like you can’t start talking tech without talking about mobile tech.  And when you talk mobile tech, you’re probably talking apps.

Apps have been on my mind recently.  If you can think it, there’s almost certainly an app for that, particularly in the medical field (I’m looking at you oddly-specific-but-apparently-very-accurate baby due date calculator), and the new generation of future healthcare professionals turns to the phone in their pocket for the answer before they even think to turn to the nearest computer terminal.  In response to a recent survey at our organization in which our library patrons clamored for more mobile information resources, a coworker and I are developing a class on “Mobile Resources for Health” (yes, we suffer from a lack of creativity regarding class titles, feel free to offer suggestions in the comments) which thus far consists mainly of a large collection of interesting apps and advice on how to find more.

So here’s a few of the VERY basic apps that I’ve found in my research for that class. These are essential for everyone from first year medical students to senior reference librarians to have on their smartphones or tablets.  If these aren’t particularly new or interesting to you, please feel free to suggest alternatives (or champion the ones you do use!) in the comments section.

Welcome to the SC/MLA Blog, Southern Salutations!

By Emily Brennan, MLIS, MUSC Library, Charleston, SC

SC/MLA is thrilled to announce our new blog, Southern Salutations, as well as our revamped Facebook and Twitter pages! Keeping up to date with chapter news and connecting with colleagues is now easier than ever. This purpose of Southern Salutations is to communicate timely information to chapter members, facilitate discussions through posts and comments, and increase participation in SC/MLA activities. The blog also serves as an online archive of discussion topics.

There are four ways to read Southern Salutations:

• Simply read the blog from the Southern Salutations homepage
• Subscribe to blog posts through email: enter your email address in the “Follow By Email” box on the blog homepage
• Like “SoChapMLA” on Facebook (blog posts will publish to Facebook)
• Follow “SoChapMLA” on Twitter (blog posts will publish to Twitter)

Please contact Emily Brennan (brennane@musc.edu) if you are interested in guest authoring a blog post, have suggestions for topics, or have any questions. We look forward to connecting with you!

Emily Brennan, MLIS, is a Research and Education Librarian at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) Library, and when not working, loves spending time with her two children and chihuahua.