Reflections from a 2025 MLA Annual Meeting Scholarship winner.
On the morning of Wednesday, April 30th, I sat down at First Sip of the Day with a to-go cup of coffee and the packet of materials I’d just received at Registration. I let my coffee cool and mingled the new papers with the printouts I’d over-packed to prepare for my first MLA conference. I felt a pang of joy - “I’m here and get to attend days full of amazing sessions!” - and a twinge of defeat at all the presentations layered on top of each other. I worried: How can I best maximize sessions? Which can I attend later virtually? Which have slides I can download? Are there any I’ll regret missing? Who will I miss seeing and talking to? For that last question, I decided to start with the librarians sitting around me, reading and caffeinating. I introduced myself and started chatting about what everyone was looking forward to. One tablemate mentioned the Be Well MLA Forum happening in a few minutes. I flipped through my program and found the description: an open forum to explore how to “prioritize wellness in our work and lives.” It seemed like a thoughtful way to ground my conference experience in well-being rather than stress or perfectionism. So, I decided to attend with her.
The Be Well Forum, hosted by the Be Well Committee, was held in a large room with round tables adorned with fidgets and stress balls. Each table had a facilitator to lead insightful conversations on various wellness topics. I debated focusing this blog on the specific tables I visited and the incredible librarians I met, but there aren’t enough words to do it justice. My experiences, while brilliant, were just one part of a larger picture. What stood out most was the feeling of unity and care I felt from the Be Well Committee - and that I felt for them in return. Dozens of other librarians were having similar experiences at tables all around me. While our interests varied (from music to crafting to improv to journaling), the sense of finding a place to nourish those interests in our professional community felt universal. There was a deep sense of connection and human-ness that transcended our work, yet was intimately tied to it. For me, the Be Well Forum was an antidote to a lot of existential dread. There are loud voices doomcasting the end of our profession - voices that say things like, “Why can’t the nurses just Google it?” or “Wouldn’t ChatGPT be able to do a PubMed search?” But these voices - external and internal - miss the most important part of why health sciences librarianship matters: human connection. What does it mean to be a human (librarian) helping humans (patrons) navigate health information in the Age of AI? We’re not just information conduits or predictive models. We are people who hunger to learn, to connect, and to eat curly fries. That human hunger has its own irreplaceable value. In the end, everything that fosters health is for humans - our survival, our learning, our community building - during our brief, shared time on this “little blue dot,” as Carl Sagan put it. Even if we each experience full lifespans and healthspans, we expand ourselves by sincerely sharing our lives with each other - at work, at home, and everywhere in between.
On Friday, May 2nd, I left MLA ’25 after attending a tremendous number of wonderful papers, posters, and interactive sessions. I noted links to articles to print out and collected business cards to follow up on back in Connecticut. I also used the conference app to read through slides and handouts from sessions I couldn’t attend live. Equally, I left with a desire to actually open and complete my Pusheen crochet kit and to give my plants the kind of light they need to survive and thrive.
Victoria Helwig
Research Services Librarian to the Health Sciences with liaison appointments to Nursing, Allied Health, and Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences
University of Connecticut (UConn) Library
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