EAHIL Report from Xan Goodman

First, I would like to thank NCNMLG for their kind support of my application for a professional development grant.   For the purpose of this blog entry I was asked to write about one aspect of the EAHIL workshop. EAHIL is the European Association for Health Information and Libraries is it an event held between EAHIL conferences.  This year the workshop was held in Istanbul, Turkey at Koç University.  Before talking about one specific aspect of the EAHIL workshop I must mention the conference organization.

Similar to NCNMLG joint meetings the EAHIL workshop is a small event. For the 2011 workshop there were 178 participants from 38 countries represented.  The local arrangements committee did an exemplary job of organizing events, breaks, plenary sessions and parallel paper presentations.  Koç University served as the venue for workshop events.  Koç is an eighteen year old institution located in lush hilltop location in the northernmost area of Istanbul, Sayrier.   From campus one can glimpse a view of the Black Sea.   The university is close enough to the nearest town by a short taxi ride but too far to walk.  At Koç I had the feeling of being cloistered in a scholarly hilltop environment, where I could study in peace and serenity. I know it sounds like I enjoyed it a bit too much, in fact I would not mind returning to visit Koç as a visiting librarian.

Now, onto the event I would like to focus on.  I am new to medical librarianship and always want to learn more about MeSH.  I decided to attend a MeSH SIG meeting to see what I could learn. Maurella Della Seta from Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Rome, Italy and GunBrit Knutssön from Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm Sweden were conveners of this SIG.  We discussed issues with translating MeSH into other languages something I must admit I had not considered.   Librarians were dealing with challenges translating.  Colleagues from Tunisia talked about working on translating MeSH into Arabic.  Even though there is an existing translation for MeSH in Arabic it is outdated.

Also librarians struggle with translating concepts from their mother tongue into English when some concepts do not exist in English.  On top of all of this medical terminology is simply difficult to translate.   With creativity and resourcefulness librarians reach out to experts to help with translations.  A colleague from Norway revealed how her library works with an Association of Physicians to assist librarians with translations.   Librarians do the translating and confer with expert physicians for input on the final product.  I learned more about differences between MeSH browser and MeSH in PubMed.  Prior to attending the SIG I was unaware of the MeSH browser.

We discussed benefits of implementing MeSH into your local library system to allow searchers to view MeSH trees in a local catalog.  Our international colleagues were busy creating tools to enable them to easily convert MeSH into their local systems.  GunBrit encouraged the group to remember that when translating MeSH to remember that they are translating MeSH not creating a new vocabulary.   Overall the SIG MeSH group provided an engaging and enlightening discussion.  I learned about issues our fellow librarians are having with MeSH and ideas about how to integrate MeSH into our local catalog at my university.   More importantly attending the EAHIL conference gave me an opportunity to view librarianship in a global perspective.  Reference and instruction librarians are tackling the same issues around the world: how to collaborate with faculty at our institutions, how to deliver high quality instruction face to face and online, and how to integrate new technologies for learning.  Attending EAHIL allowed me see the work of librarians from all over the world with an added bonus of being a participant and a presenter at an international workshop.  Thank you NCNMLG for your support via a professional development grant.
–Xan Goodman, MLIS, AHIP
Reference and Instruction Librarian
Roseman University of Health Sciences
11 Sunset Way, Henderson, NV 89014
(702)968-1620/xgoodman@roseman.edu

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