Upcoming Learning Opportunities for April and May

On your mark...Get set...LEARN!

Are you trying to brush up on your mad medical librarian skills before MLA’s annual conference in May? Or did Spring just suddenly make you feel excited about learning new things again?

Well, as your first-grade teacher once said, it’s time to put on your learning hats, screw in your listening ears, and pop in your watching eyes (wow, first-grade teachers can be gruesomely graphic!), because we’ve got some great learning opportunities for you! 

Spice Up Your Instruction With Nearpod!

By Emily Brennan, MLIS, Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC Library)

Do you want an easy way to jazz up your instruction and make it more interactive? Then check out Nearpod! Nearpod is an online classroom tool for teachers to engage students with interactive lessons. You can create a very basic presentation from within Nearpod but I think it is best to import a PowerPoint then add interactive features throughout your presentation. Once you complete your presentation, students join the presentation by going to Nearpod (app or website) and entering a code. Students see the presentation (controlled by you) on their device and participate in the interactive features. You can share their answers with the class or keep them private.

The free version (Silver Account) allows up to 30 devices to join the session and includes 50MB of storage. If you get 5 friends to sign-up for Nearpod (via your invitation), you can freely upgrade to the Gold Account for 6 months. The Gold Account ($10/month) includes the additional features of assigning homework, receiving detailed reports, integrating multimedia, and 3GB of storage.

SC/MLA 2016 Annual Meeting: Call for Papers and Posters

You are invited to submit proposals for contributed papers and posters for the 2016 SC/MLA 66th annual meeting October in Greenville, SC on October 2-6. The meeting will be held at the Westin Poinsett in downtown Greenville.  

This year’s theme is Re-Think IT: The Evolving Landscape of Libraries. 

Check the conference website for full meeting details. As plans are finalized, find up-to-the-minute information there. Meanwhile, please consider submitting a proposal for a poster or a paper.

Member Spotlight: Maggie Ansell

Every month, we would like to take a moment to learn more about a fellow librarian and SC/MLA member.  For April, we would like you to meet Maggie, a nursing librarian from Florida who was easily bribed with fancy teas to be the guinea pig graciously volunteered to share a bit about herself.  

Name: Maggie Ansell

SC/MLA Member Since: January 2015

First Professional Position: Nursing & Consumer Health Liaison Librarian at the Health Science Center Libraries of the University of Florida

Education (Include all Degrees): Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts, St. John’s College; Master of Library and Information Science, University of Washington.

Favorite website, blog, or twitter feed: One website that I’ve followed for a few years now is Zooniverse (www.zooniverse.org), a citizen science web portal that gives volunteers the opportunity to contribute to data-intensive research through simple identification and transcription tasks, which can be anything from counting penguins in the Antarctic, to transcribing diaries from WWI.  There are even several biomedical projects, such as Worm Watch Lab, Microscopy Masters, and Cell Slider, whose data is being used for genetics, protein modeling, and cancer research!

Upcoming Honors and Awards

While the deadline is quickly approaching for the Honorary Membership and T. Mark Hodges awards, there are three other great award opportunities with a June 1 deadline. Those scholarships and awards are the Martha C. Watkins Memorial Scholarship, First Time Attendee Scholarship, and Academic Librarian of the Year. Please submit applications/nominations to the Chair of the Honors and Awards Committee.

Are you interested in taking a course or workshop at the next Southern Chapter annual meeting? Then consider applying for the Martha C. Watkins Memorial Scholarship! It was established in 1996 to honor Martha Watkins and can be used for any necessary expenses in order to take a course at the annual meeting. Applicants who are interested in applying must be current members of SC/MLA and work in a hospital library. Please see the website for further details on applying.