NLM and the Medical Library Association to Support Scholarships,
Recruitment for Minority Medical Librarians
American Library Association, Network Members
Involved
NLM has provided $102,000 to the Medical Library Association
(MLA) to encourage minority students to choose health science
librarianship as a career.
Through this support, the National Library of Medicine will
enable MLA to strengthen the Association's programs for recruiting
minorities into the medical library profession and to increase
scholarship opportunities for minority students seeking degrees in
librarianship. NLM funds will be used to increase the size of the
MLA's existing minority scholarship, to support, in partnership with
MLA, the American Library Association's Spectrum Scholars program to
attract students of color to graduate programs in library and
information studies, and for outreach to minority college and high
school students.
For many years NLM has actively recruited minority graduates of
library schools to the NLM Associate Fellowship program, a highly
successful post-masters internship program designed to develop
future leaders in health sciences librarianship. (Information about
the program can be viewed at www.nlm.nih.gov/about/training/associate/index.html.)
Although these recruitment efforts have been successful in
attracting some outstanding minority participants into the program,
there is a distinct need to create more minority applicants in the
pipeline.
"Only 9.5% of current library school graduates are members of
minority groups. To increase diversity in health sciences
librarianship we must greatly increase diversity in librarianship as
a whole. MLA is very pleased to be working with NLM and with the
American Library Association on concrete steps toward this goal,"
said J. Michael Homan, current MLA President.
NLM Associate Director for Library Operations, Betsy L.
Humphreys, stated that "Expanding the number of minorities in
librarianship becomes even more critical as patients, family
members, and the public turn to the World Wide Web and local
libraries for health information. We need diversity if we are to
build health information services that are understandable and
sensitive to the concerns of all who need them."
The Houston Academy of Medicine--Texas Medical Center, which is
the Regional Medical Library for the South Central Region of the
National Network of Libraries of Medicine, will coordinate the work
on behalf of the NLM. The project officer for the Medical Library
Association is Carla J. Funk, Executive Director, 312-419-9094, ext.
14; email: funk@mlahq.org .
The Medical Library Association is an educational organization of
more than 1,100 institutions and 3,800 individual members in the
health sciences information field. MLA members serve society by
developing new health information delivery systems, fostering
educational and research programs for health sciences information
professionals, and encouraging an enhanced public awareness of
health care issues.
New Sort Capability in PubMed
A Sort pull-down menu will be added to the PubMed Clipboard in
July, to allow users to sort citations by author, journal, or
publication date.
To sort citations by author, journal or publication date, click
on the Sort pull-down menu to select a sort field, then click
Display. Publication Date sorts the most recent citations first, the
secondary sort is journal. Author and journal sorts A to Z, the
secondary sort is publication date.
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