Reflections from a NAHSL 2024 Annual Meeting Scholarship winner.
Thank you to the NAHSL Professional Development Committee for helping me with expenses to attend the 2024 NAHSL Annual Meeting, which also happened to be NAHSL’s 65th anniversary!
As a librarian new to health sciences, I was looking forward to this conference to learn more about this new field of librarianship I’ve chosen and to meet other librarians in this field. I frequently think about what my future in this profession will look like and conferences are a great way to be inspired to gather new ideas to bring back to my library. “Challenging Times” seems to be a phrase that librarians hear a lot in our careers. Many moments in this conference helped me think about how to deal with the challenges that I’ll experience and how to build my toolkit of resources to get through these times and help my library grow.
With this mindset, I found M.J. Tooey’s Keynote so inspirational. It was amazing to hear her story and how her career changed over time. Naturally, it made me think about where my career will lead me. To go with the conference theme of 65 years of NAHSL, she touched on the many joys of the career and also some of the challenges that librarians have dealt with over the years. M.J. gave us good reminders there will always be challenges in libraries but, librarians have always prevailed. There will always be new technology that some people will use against librarians and try to invalidate our profession. But much like we did with the internet and Google, we need to embrace new technology like AI and then, use it to our advantage. Some of the biggest takeaways I had from her keynote are to remember that MLA is a vital tool and that NLM is a big resource to librarians. When in doubt, it’s always important to look at MLA as your professional home, reflect on their ethics and values, and seek out help from your colleagues. It was a good reminder of why professional development is essential in our careers.
Whether someone was a first-timer to the conference like me or a veteran medical librarian, I’m sure she reminded us to use all our resources to our advantage and remember that we’re not in the field alone.
Emily Ziemba,
MLIS Outreach Librarian
The University of Connecticut Health Sciences Library
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