MLA Meeting in Vancouver "Demystifies the Dragon" and is Roaring
Success
Over 2,400 Attend Conference Exploring Challenges of Medical
Librarianship in New Millennium
More than 2,400 health sciences information professionals and
exhibitors from all over the world participated in the joint meeting
of the Medical Library Association (MLA) and the Canadian Health
Libraries Association/Association des bibliothèques de la santé du
Canada (CHLA-ABSC) in Vancouver, British Columbia, May 5-10, 2000.
In the beautiful waterside setting of Vancouver, meeting
participants had the opportunity to exchange ideas with colleagues
and discuss strategies for dealing with the challenges facing the
health sciences librarianship profession in the 21st century.
As always, NLM had a high profile at the meeting, with a large
and well-trafficked exhibit booth and many educational sessions.
At the popular "NLM Update" session, NLM Director Dr. Donald A.B.
Lindberg chronicled the Library's efforts to provide health
information to the public at large. Several of the means to this end
were mentioned, including the public library pilot project and the
funding of 49 outreach programs nationwide. Associate Director for
Library Operations Betsy L. Humphreys and Dr. Alexa McCray, head of
the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, also
spoke at the NLM Update, covering such diverse topics as the new
DOCLINE system (to be released in July), the NLM Gateway (a new
single portal that will afford the ability to search all of the
databases at once), and ClinicalTrials.gov.
At one of the meeting's plenary sessions, Betsy Humphreys and
Paul H. Ginsparg, PhD, a physicist at the Los Alamos National
Laboratory, addressed e-publishing issues.
Sheldon Kotzin, Chief, Bibliographic Services Division, gave what
he admitted was his 20th presentation at NLM, this one a "Sunrise
Seminar," updating the audience about new PubMed features, changes
in indexing procedures, and the extension of OLDMEDLINE to include
biomedical literature before 1960, among other topics. | 
