Receiving the NCNMLG Professional Development Award for 2023-2024 allowed me to attend the annual MLA conference in Portland, OR. The conference ran from May 18 through 21, with the theme of Stronger Together, focusing on collaborative librarianship and advancing together as a profession. The funding NCNMLG provided allowed me to attend the conference earlier, arriving on the 18th to participate in the AI Summit, “Why AI? Transforming the Health Information Profession,” which provided attendees and vendors the opportunity to discuss AI and the role it currently plays in librarianship and future implications, both for health sciences librarianship and health sciences in general.
MLA 2024 was jam-packed with paper sessions, lightning talks, and immersion sessions, and along with the focus on togetherness and connection, many of the sessions covered digital and health equity and BINPOC representation in medicine. One of the presentations that I enjoyed the most was, “Do You See Me?: The Lack of Representation of Diverse Skin Tones in Medical Education,” that discussed librarian efforts and programming in developing and promoting visual resources of diverse skin tones for medical students. This presentation was really inspiring- demonstrating in a very tangible way just how systemic racism is embedded throughout the medical education process, from the resources used, to how clinicians instruct, and to what tools are prioritized. Libraries do a great job of promoting inclusion and representation within the stacks and book collections but it would be amazing to push even further and challenge the publishers and vendors toward more accountability in the resources they sell to us; how are they promoting inclusion and representation?
I was also able to attend an immersion session on slow librarianship entitled, “Lessons in Slow Librarianship: Making Room for Thought, Intention, and Kindness,” that discussed how slow librarianship principles can be applied to health sciences librarianship. It can be extra challenging to incorporate principles of slow librarianship into health sciences librarianship (which lives in a culture of urgency) and the presenters offered some great exercises that allowed for real-world examples and implementation.
The conference culminated with the John P. McGovern’s lecture by Dr. Safiya Noble, author of Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, reinforcing that AI has been here, is here to stay, and how we as librarians need to come together to address issues in digital and health equity.
I am thankful to have received the professional development award and encourage anyone that is interested in attending a conference or a professional development event to reach out to NCNMLG and apply.
– Submitted by Ana Corral