The first day of the conference went well, and the academic programme was not too overwhelming, as it tends to be on the first day.
The day opened at 09.15 with an opening ceremony. There was a welcome from the Local Organizing Committee and from the EAHIL board as well as a welcome from the University leadership and from the National Library (where the main event is located). This was followed by the first keynote address.
Keynote 1
Kristīne Pabērza-Ramiresa: Community-centred impact planning and evaluation for health information libraries
Kristine works for IFLA, and she started her keynote with a brief overview of IFLA’s work. Kristine is working on demonstrating library impact, and her keynote concerned this topic. How can we demonstrate the value of a library? We are pummeling stakeholders and leaders with how important we are and how valuable we are to the institutions we serve, but the information is not hitting its mark. We have to know who we are talking to and define our goals for what we want to achieve, Kristine said.
Kristine talked about how our (meaning librarians) perspective differs from e.g. stakeholder perspectives, and that this is part of the problem. We want to focus on services and activities, while stakeholders might be more interested in ROI and impact. We have to adapt what we talk about to what they are interested in, otherwise we will not get through with the message.
We often have problems understanding impact. Most of us have routines for assessment and evaluation, but we often stop at user satisfaction. To measure impact, Kristine said, we have to stop confusing performance and satisfaction measures with outcome and impact measures. If we really want to measure impact, we have to move beyond user satisfaction studies, and we must develop real curiosity and reflection. Kristine went on to talk about the Community Centered Logic Model and how to use it to match the library services to real user needs.
After a coffee break, it was time for my first workshop of the conference.
Workshop
Marydee Ojala: Finding out way to effective use of GenAI tools (with some warning signs as well)
The first time I met Marydee was at a conference called Internet Librarian International that took place in London. It was a loooong time ago! 🙂 I remember it quite well, though, because Marydee was talking about alternative search engines to Google back then, and I had a lot of fun testing a whole bunch of them. This time, the theme was generative AI, more specifically large language models like ChatGPT. Marydee talked about how prompt engineering is something that everyone is talking about, but that it means different things to different people. Prompting should not be confused with ordinary searching.
Marydee went on to talk about more general things about generative AI, like how it is not good for factfinding, but it can be very useful for creative writing and brainstorming. It is a statistical predictive analysis, and it doesn’t retrieve things – it makes things. We call them different things, like chatbots, assistants, agents or copilots, but they are all much the same things. These GPTs have no sense of humour or satire, and it has no personality. Sometimes, we can also wonder what matter they are trained on, seeing as things from satire websites such as The Onion, sometimes crop up.
As most of us have already discovered, asking the right questions is imperative for what answers you get. You have to be very specific and detailed in your prompting, and you can tell the bot to say that it doesn’t know if it doesn’t know the answer. This can help to minimize the hallucinations. So – we can actually tell it to not make things up.
There are many frameworks for prompt engineering, like RISE (role, input, steps, expectations) OR PAR (problem, action, results). The language we use is very important, Marydee said, so if we ask the bot to give us an answer on the value of libraries, it will generate a different answer than if we ask it to explain the worth of libraries or ROI of libraries.
When it comes to prompts, it can be useful to use one of the frameworks, but the most important thing is to be specific. You can tell the bot:
Role – which role do you want the chatbot to be (add context)
Theme – what do you want it to do? Give examples of steps.
Format – what output do you want? A list? A paragraph? Image?
Tone – what tone should it be? Academic style? Blog post?
You can also ask the bot to suggest good prompts and you can tell it to improve itself. You should check the citations, and you can tell the bot to fix the errors it makes.
Marydee also talked about some of the ethical challenges we face, and that we should educate ourselves on these matters. All Danish papers recently announced that they have joined forces to sue OpenAI for copyright infringement, and it remains a large problem.
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So – after this there were sponsor presentations and lightning poster presentations.
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In the evening, there was an optional walking tour of Riga and a welcome reception at a museum.
European Association of Health Information in Libraries (EAHIL) has an annual event. Every other year it has a conference format, and every other year a workshop format – although, to be fair, it is mostly the same thing in my view. This year, it was a conference year, and it took place in Riga, Latvia from 10 – 14 June 2024. The Continuing Education Courses (known as CECs) were held at Riga University on the Tuesday, and the conference itself was held in the National Library of Latvia from Wednesday to Friday.
National Library of Latvia, seen from the bridge.
The theme this year was: “Small Step and a Giant Leap: Reorienting Towards a New Environment” with the following subthemes: Shaping the Educational Environment, Research & Open Science, Libraries as change agents, Visibility & Strategic presence and Technology & Tools. The idea behind the conference theme this year was to emphasise the libraries’ role in the evolving society, and an encouragement to adapt ourselves in order to thrive, in small and great ways.
The programme was quite diverse, and there was a good mixture of oral presentations and workshops. There were also several social gatherings, and an optional walking tour of the old town of Riga.
In the following blog posts, I will tell you more about what went down at the conference, and this time, I’ll write one blog post for each day of the conference, in stead of separating the posts by content type the way I did last year. I am going to write up a special blog post for the workshop that I held with Elena Springall from the University of Toronto, though. That post will be written with Elena. Other than that, I will write one post for each of the conference days. So – if you want to hear more about my recent EAHIL adventure, feel free to subscribe to the blog or just keep an eye out for more.
I am still in the process of writing up some notes from EAHIL, but if I have calculated correctly, this will be the second to last entry. I always like to take a little time to write up notes from conferences I attend, as it gives me some time to let things sink in, but it also gives me an opportunity to go through my notes and remind myself of ideas and to look things up etc. I also find that I remember better when I write about things, and it gives me a chance to revisit ideas later. Some people are great at live-blogging, but it doesn’t work for me. I have to think about things.
Anyway, I will try to jot down some thoughts here about what I heard at the oral presentations I attended. EAHIL 2023 had four parallell sessions. Each session had to have a host, and I took it upon myself to host as many oral presentations as possible (seeing as they are more intense to host than workshops, for instance). My notes are a bit sparse, as I was also tweeting from the official EAHIL account as well as keeping time etc. Still, I hope to be forgiven for not giving too much detail. The presentations can be downloaded from the EAHIL 2023 website to give more information.
Wednesday
Session1.1. Oral presentations.
There were three presentations in this session. Taisa Sallinen (University of Eastern Finland) started with a presentation of the results of a survey on research data management (RDM). The survey contained questions on the elements of RDM and sought to find out how familiar PhD students were with these elements and what needs they expressed in the area. The overall results pointed to a low familiarity with data management and a high need for more information and guidance. Not surprisingly, considering the sensitivity of data, the health department students had a higher need for guidance than students from many other departments.
The second presentation came from Eva Hessman and Helen Sjöblom (Gothenburg University). Eva and Helen talked about the development of a separate team for research support, and the added value of the services they provide. The librarians had started an outreach program that helped putting the library services on the PhD students’ radar, and this led to more involvement in teaching and guidance for these students.
The third, and final, presentation for this session came from Terena Solomons (Western Australian Group for Evidence Informed Healthcare Practice/ University of Western Australia) – who had come all the way to Norway from Australia! Terena talked about her experience in working with the JBI center of exellence, and how she had embraced new skillsets and learning new things. Terena used two cases to show us how she had developed these new skills. She also talked about federated search and how she used tools like JBI Sumari, Rayyan and Research screener in her work with scoping reviews.
Session 2.1. Oral presentations
There were four presentations in this session, and I held my presentation on Vocational awe here. I shared this session with three other presenters, and I will do my best to sum up their content here.
Ruth Jenkins (University of Edinburgh), who had to suffer an interruption while the Norwegian Civil Defence tested the new emergency system by sounding the alarm on all mobile phone (sorry, Ruth!), spoke about designing and co-leading a credit bearing course on critical literature review. Ruth talked about how the librarians had collaborated with one of the masters programs to develop this integrated course. The course gave the librarians an opportunity to get away from the one-shot / guest lecturer thing and to extent the boundaries and limitations of these traditions. The course was developed in collaboration, and this gave new opportunities.
The next speaker was Sandy Iverson (Canadian Health Libraries Association). She spoke about the development of a leadership program for health librarians. Sandy introduced us to the origin of the journey (the need for general leadership skills and strategic leadership and planning) and how the content was developed as well as the assessments so far. The program was intended to last one year, but it had to be somewhat extended due to the pandemic and all its challenges. Most participants in the program felt that they had gained insights that had helped them, especially through the pandemic.
The third speaker was Colleen Cuddy (Stanford University). Colleen spoke about the use of Individual Development Plans, or IDPs, for staff career planning and strategic planning for the library. IDPs are documents that can be used for individual librarians to plan their career goals and what they need to do to achieve them, but they can also be a useful tool for library managers to help align the individuals with the overall strategic goal for the library. It can help the managers see what skillsets the individual librarians have or want to develop, and it can be a way to see the whole picture when hiring new librarians. Most of all, though, it can be a useful tool for the individual librarian to get some structure and to find a good course for their learning and development. I found this presentation very interesting and useful, and I think more libraries should implement this. I was fortunate back in the day to have a manager who thought like this, so it was not a new thought, but it was great to be reminded of how useful IDPs can be! This will stick with me. 🙂
Thursday
Session 5.1. Oral presentations
There were four presentations in this session. The first presenter was Elena Springall (University of Toronto), who gave us her presentation on emotions and emotion work in libraries. This was a very good and very interesting presentation (maybe especially for me since I held my presentation on vocational awe the day before, where emotional labour is a vital part :)). Elena talked about how she had experienced burnout and had done some mid-career reflections, and how she had performed a narrative literature review on emotional labour. What I found particularly interesting was what Elena explained about display rules and emotion rules. She said it well in her presentation, so I will link to the page where the presentations can be downloaded here. Elena went on to discuss what the written and unwritten rules are, who makes them and, most interestingly, who they benefit. Elena concluded with what she intends to do to manage the expectations, and how to avoid burnout. Great presentation that will stick with me!
The second presentation was from Glyneva Bradley-Ridout (University of Toronto), who spoke about wellness initiatives for students (and librarians). The last few years have been very hard, Glyneva explained, and many were anxious about going back to the physical library. The workload has increased and many face burnout. The students are also struggling, and many librarians and students are desperate to find some joy in their work- and student lives. The library tested a positivity wall, a de-stress initiative for exam periods and an ongoing project on an indoor garden as some initiatives to improve wellness. The positivity wall was just a blank wall with a promt, like “what are you grateful for?” or “what are your goals this year?” and the students could write something on a post-it and stick it to the wall. The library also had positive experiences with the unstudy space, where the library created a theme, and there were student activities like craft corners. Glyneva held a very interesting presentation that left us all more inspired.
The third presentation was by Floor Ruiter (Maastricht university). Floor gave us a talk on decolonising search strategies, a topic that has received more attention the last few years. Floor talked about how databases are biased toward western countries and traditions, and there are serious knowledge and culture gaps that impact our results when we search for articles. With the help of a case study, Floor showed us the importance of local knowledge and authors, and how the databases represent local knowledge. It was a very timely and interesting talk.
The final talk for this session came from Jane Falconer (London school of hygiene and tropical medicine). Jane’s presentation also dealt with decolonizing search strategies in systematic reviews with particular attention to inclusion of the global south. Jane talked about the study she and her colleagues are working on at the moment. It is a critical examination on how the global south is represented in systematic reviews. 11 systematic review groups gave the librarians access to their full data sets, and the librarians are now working their way through these to analyse the representations. Results to be published later this year.
Friday
Session 7.3. Oral presentations
It was the last day and the last of the parallell sessions for EAHIL 2023, and there were three presentations in this session. Well done to the presenters for keeping the attention of the attendees on an early start on the last day!
The first presenter was Nele Pauwels (Ghent university). She talked about the representation of search details in academic articles, and specifically how well the author guidelines specify what is needed. We know that, even with reporting guidelines on systematic reviews, many reviews are published with substandard or insufficient methodology, and search strategies are often missing or poorly written up. This can have consequences like lack of reproducibility. When author guidelines are poor, a lack of knowledge between authors and peer reviewers can lead to publishing even though the standards/ reporting guidelines have not been met. The team that Nele represented at EAHIL, did an analysis of 169 unique journals, and based on preliminary findings, the team suggest that information specialists should be more involved in reporting/ writing the methodology.
The next presenters were Floriane Muller and Pablo Iriatre (University of Geneva). Their work was done on what they called “unconquerable journals” – journals who still resist Open Access publishing. Floriane and Pablo had done a study on who and what these unconquerable journals are, what they have in common and what the library can do about it. [Unfortunately, I lost my notes from this presentation, but have a look at their presentation.]
The final presenter was Eva Seidlmeyer (ZB MED) who talked about machine learning and good research practices, and she raised interesting questions and concerns about censorship and malinformation. There was a lot of interest in this presentation, and many wanted to ask Eva more questions, but we ran out of time for more than just a few. As with the previous presentation, I have managed to lose my notes, so the write-up is sparce, but check out the presentation to see more.
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Well – this became a mega blog post. If you are still with me, well done you! As I have said before, I prefer to have everything in one, even if it becomes really long, just because I find it easier to draw conclusions or see the big picture this way.
I will write up my last post with some final thoughts on the overall experience on EAHIL 2023, but just a few thoughts here on the oral presentations. Since I could not be in more than one room at the time, I obviously missed many oral presentations, but of those I heard, I found much to interest me. I found it interesting that there were so many new, and sometimes even political, presentations. Topics like burnout, decolonization, mental health and machine learning – all in one conference. While the workshops were perhaps more traditional, all things considered, with topics like systematic reviews, the oral presentations were really fresh, I think. (Not that there is anything wrong with systematic reviews etc. These are at the core of our skill sets – and the workshops were very popular! I just think that it is interesting that newer topics also come forward, and particularly problematic policies and systemic failures that we are a part of. I found the oral presentations really highlighted many of these issues, and I am so glad that I got to be a part of this.
When the Call for papers opened for EAHIL 2023, I sent in my own submission for an oral presentation. It may have been a bit ambitious, considering I was programme chair, but I really wanted to take part in the conference, too. I decided early on that I wanted to do a talk on a subject that has become more important to me in the past couple of years, but that I have never written or spoken about before, namely vocational awe. I decided that I wanted to explore this more thoroughly, and I started a literature review. The review itself is not finished, but I hope that I will get the chance to work on it later.
The presentation I used can be downloaded from the EAHIL website, but I will include it here, too. I have also written a sort of script that I loosely used during my presentation, and I will paste that in here, too, so that the presentation makes more sense. I received many kind words after this presentation, and I wish I had been able to have more conversations on this during the event. Unfortunately, I had to run off to host another session, but I hope that people will reach out later or read the review if I get to publish it some time.
This is the script. The numbers represent the slide number.
The purpose of this presentation is to remind us that we are only human and as such, flawed individuals who need support, encouragement and help to stop and think.
Introduction
Before I begin, I would just like to do a quick show of hands. How many of you have heard of the term vocational awe?
I always like to begin with a story. It might be somewhat recognizable to some of you.
This girl loved to read. My mother loved to read, and I quickly became an avid reader of anything from Nancy Drew to encyclopedias… Yup.. Encyclopedias! To me, the local library was a heavenly space. Filled with every story imaginable (or so I thought), audiobooks, games and lovely, service-minded people who seemed to love nothing more than to find me something new to read. It never occurred to me that the librarians had lives of their own or that they were probably underpaid and overworked. To me, the librarians were guardians of knowledge and defenders of stories. The library felt like it existed in a separate universe.
Even so, I ended up in library school as a bit of a coincidence, but I was very happy – and even proud, to be there. I felt like I was a part of an immensely old profession, almost a secret society of the few worthy to be initiated, defenders of the galaxy, protectors of democracy..
There was no shortage of these stories. The professors were all about how the future of information would be shaped by us librarians, and the professors hereby supported the idea of librarians as the saviours, the rescuers, the heros of an unruly and uncontrollable world. I never even questioned this. I had become a missonary for the cult, a «true believer».
When Hillary Clinton spoke to the ALA Conference in 2017, this is one of the things she included in her speech: [Libraries are]: “guardians of the First Amendment and the freedom to read and to speak. The work you do is at the heart of an open, inclusive, diverse society.”
Images like these keep popping up in my feed on social media – and I used to love them – and to a certain degree I still do. I mean, they soothe the ego, they make you feel like you are working for a greater cause – and that feels good.. For a while, at least. But when they pop up now, I can no longer enjoy them as they bring with them the bitter aftertaste.
Now that I have set the scene: Let us turn to what vocational awe is. In 2018, I read an article by Fobazi Ettarh, called «Vocational awe and librarianship: the lies we tell ourselves». It is hard to explain what I felt. Annoyed, overwhelmed, engaged, sad, inspired – it was all happening at the same time. I was reminded of it again when I read an excellent article called «Serving everyone or serving no one» by Bastone and Clement (2022). That was when I decided to do a literature review. Ettarh’s original text is as interesting today as it was in 2018. If anything, it is even more relevant – now that libraries are under attack (as we heard David say in the keynote). Vocational awe is an idea that we are working for the higher good, in institutions who are inherently good and flawless. We are encouraged (remember what the professors told me) to be «true believers», working for a higher power. In the sect of true believers, it is hard to change things without being seen as a negative force or someone who lacks dedication to the profession. In her original article from 2018, Fobazi Ettarh had a heading called «Martyrdom is not long-lasting career», and that stuck with me. When you are working to save democracy, be the defender of the weak, the protector of knowledge, it seems petty to argue for a full lunch break, Ettarh said. Just to be clear: democracy, freedom, knowledge, justice and equality are not bad values. It is just that it is completely unreasonable to expect an institution to manage them all flawlessly.
Over to the literature review. I know that the subtitle reads: literature review, but seeing as it has not been published, or even finished, yet I will leave the slides in so that you can have a look at the method etc. if you choose.
My goal was not to do a systematic review or a complex search at all. My goal was to get an overview – the big picture of how vocational awe as a term is used and what themes are emphasised.
There were more themes than this descibed, but these were some of the most prevalent. Many of these themes were discussed in Ettarh’s original text, but they were exemplified and broadened in many of the studies I included. I have chosen a few of these to address in this presentation.
I will just include a table of the included studies with the thematic analysis, but I will not go into it now. You can have a look at the slides later if you are interested. This is not finished. I have only just begun the thematic analysis
I will jump right in. I just wanted to highlight a few of the themes I found in my review so far. Emotional labour was first defined by Arlie Hochschild in 1983 as “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display [that is] sold for a wage”(Hochschild, 2012, p. 7), or as Moran and Nadir (2021, p. 16) call it: “the dissonance between outward-facing feelings and emotions, and emotions that are truly faced”. Emotional labour is not the same as emotion work, however. Emotion work is the social tasks one does for others, like being expected to be the one who makes the coffee every morning, or collects donations for gifts for co-workers etc. Emotional labour is the commercial twin sister of that. Toxic positivity is a part of that. Being in the flight attendant mode, smile on even if you have a migraine or would rather cry, professional demeanor, being polite to rude patrons, keeping calm even when a student is yelling out of frustration. I don’t need to tell you that that is exhausting at times.
Burnout is a real issue within all service-oriented professions. However, it hits librarians particularly hard because everyone outside the profession picture us as having the dream job – just sitting around reading books all day. It is a double whammy with shame. Shame because you can’t take the pressure anymore and shame because you are afraid of not being believed. No one equals librarians with stress. No one. I have already touched on the issue of emotional labour and toxic positivity, but job creep is an equally important stress factor. Van Dyne and Ellis defined job creep as: “the slow and subtle expansion of employee job duties that is not officially recognized by the organization” (Van Dyne & Ellis, 2004, p. 181). Does that sound familiar? When I started my current job years ago, my duties were teaching and journal management.. Well.. Toto, we ain’t in Kansas anymore. Doing more with less, service with a smile, while being undercompensated, few real advancement opportunities other than leadership, being treated like “just service personnel” even with advanced degrees, spending your evenings or weekends for professional development because you have no time to spend on that during work hours – and then the shame of not being able to stick it out (aka vocational awe and working for a higher power). Is it any wonder that our profession is saddled with a high turnover and burned out people?
Leadership is another theme often mentioned in the articles. Power relations, too. Leading libraries can be hard. There is often little real autonomy, an increasing number of services to uphold, many budget restraints and a heterogenous population to serve. The literature points to job creep as a leadership issue. A theory is that many are afraid that if we say no, the rest of society will say that we have no value or that we are unable or unwilling to fulfil our societal responsibilities. But it isn’t so. Those who want to cut our budgets will do so no matter how many extra tasks we take on. I believe it was Fobazi Ettarh herself that explained in a podcast that there is a cycle of exploitation going on. The library hires a new, passionate librarian, this librarian is faced with the realities of library life and has the low morale experience, they reach the breaking point and leave the library (and sometimes leave the entire library sector), and the leadership either hire a new person and starts the cycle anew or (more commonly), do not hire anyone new and push the extra tasks onto existing personnel. The library is based on a Taylorism model, Ettarh said, where the library staff is like an assembly line or conveyor belt where any librarian can easily be substituted for another and where love and passion is the fuel.
Let us go back to the beginning here. The girl in the sofa who loved stories and then to the student who felt she was part of a crusade for democracy, education, knowledge and stories. Let us compare that to the academic libraries of today. Statistically speaking, Norwegian academic libraries are poorly staffed. Each librarian (I am including everyone who works in the library), has approx. 300 students each to deal with. At NTNU, the number is 400, and at my local department, the number is 750. These are only indications of course, but how well would you be able to serve 750 students?
And yet, the thing that nearly killed me, metaphorically speaking, was the loss of the idealism. The awakening from the pleasant dream that I was working for the higher good – was hard. For the Matrix fans here, I took the red pill. It doesn’t mean that I can’t take pride in my work (I DO), or that I cannot like libraries anymore (I definitly DO), but that the reality of the business that we are in has sunk in. Awe is not a comforting feeling, Ettarh reminded us, but a fearful and overwhelming one. And we need to deal.
It may seem very hopeless now after I have talked about all of these bad things. I believe, though that there are things we can do to make things better. If we start by acknowledging that the library profession is struggling and that we have some challenging times ahead of us (remember what David said), it can set us on a track to better understanding.
I want to work more for Slow librarianship. Meredith Farkas helped me understand this concept. She talks about slow librarianship as an antiracist, responsive, and values-driven practice that stands in opposition to neoliberal values. It is a process, not a destination, but it is about learning, reflection, collaboration and solidarity. I think we need to find our way back to that.
I started this presentation to tell you the story of my own path to library and information science. How the story ends is too soon to say. I can only say that we know that for a lot of librarians who started out like I did, it doesn’t end with «and they lived happily ever after». Our profession, across all the different library types, is plagued with burnout and high turnover, and it is not a sustainable way forward. As Kelly Jensen (2022) said: «Library workers can’t self-care themselves out of systemic problems». This is not an easy fix, «just do yoga in your lunch hour», kind of thing. I suggested a few things just now, but unless we stand together, we will not succeed here. First and foremost, we need to raise the issues, keep pushing it onto the table, because sticking our heads in the sand will not do. We do not have to agree on everything, but addressing the issues, bringing leadership in, writing about this can help us start a way up and out. Find a way to be a radical, positive change agent. Thank you!
Reference list
I hope that this topic will be more emphasised and discussed in our profession. I think we need to do something to prevent burnout, low moral and high turn-over. Anyway, I thank the reviewers for feedback and for accepting my oral presentation, and thank you to all who came to listen that day. Your comments made my day!
EAHIL, the European Association for Health Information in Libraries, give an event every year. This year, NTNU acted as hosts for the EAHIL 2023 event, and I have been leading the international programme committee. The event took place last week, 12-16 June, in Trondheim, and I am happy to say that it was a success! I am, of course, not unbiased here, but all the feedback so far has been positive. It was a lot (a lot!) of work, so I am happy that people enjoyed themselves and was able to learn something.
The theme this year was: “Radical positive change agents”. It is part of a quote from R. David Lankes. The original quote goes as follows:
To be a librarian is not to be neutral, or passive, or waiting for a question. It is to be a radical positive change agent within your community.”
R. David Lankes
I have always found this quite inspiring, and I think it is something that we should be reminded of from time to time. I think librarians generally tend to be good at the details, and less good to engage with the bigger picture. We tend to be all about the daily operations, and that stuff is important, but we talk less about the “WHY”. As Simon Sinek said: Start with why, then do the how and the what. I think we need to think more about the big picture, and that is why I find this quote inspiring.
We were fortunate enough to secure R. David Lankes for one of the keynotes, and the video is available from the EAHIL 2023 website now. In the keynote he amended his former quote:
To be a radical positive agent is to fight for your whole community, your values, and for democracy itself.
R. David Lankes, EAHIL 2023 keynote
David’s keynote was very interesting, and pretty tough to hear. He addressed issues like attacks on libraries and librarians, banned books, issues with lawmakers wanting to influence what libraries can stock, imposing laws that make it a felony for librarians to have certain books on the shelves etc. I think, however, that we all need to be reminded what is at stake, and that it could just as easily happen here. It was a great conversation starter.
On day 2, we had another good keynote, though very different in style and theme. It was given by Mia Høj Mathiasson, and the recording is also available on the website. It was Mia’s first keynote, but it went well! Mia is a Danish library researcher, and she was talking about how the libraries can be proactive partners in sustainability issues. Mia talked about what sustainability is, and how it relates to libraries. Libraries have taken the UN sustainability goals to heart and engaged with them. It was very interesting to hear what she had to say, and she used examples from her research during the UPSCALE project, financed by the Norwegian Research Fund.
The final keynote, on Friday 16 June, was given by Aslak Sira Myhre, our National librarian. The title of his keynote was: “Change and constant: the role of the modern library”. The recording has not yet been made available, but it will be up on the website soon.
Aslak talked about how the National library has digitized material in a grand scale, and that most of the Norwegian cultural heritage is being digitized and therefore made available to the public. He continued to say that while the National library has a physical building and printed collections, that is not what most patrons have been used. Most of the National library patrons, Aslak said, has never set foot in that library at Solli place in Oslo. They only associate it with the digital format on nb.no. That is not to say that the library as a place is dead. The libraries are Norway’s most used cultural arena, and 58 (or was it 54?) percent of the population has visited a library during 2022. It is more than ever. The printed book has been deemed dead for decades, but it is still not so. Teachers and librarians still see that children and teens want to use the printed materials. Aslak also entered into the discussions on AI and the future role of that. Stay tuned for the video on the website.
I felt very lucky and proud to be able to welcome three such keynote speakers, and I really feel like they contributed in a positive manner to the overall conference theme and just lifted the profile of the event. I heard people talking about them in the hall after each keynote, and that is a positive thing, I think. I mean, the keynote speakers are supposed to give us big picture things, ideas and their perspectives on the conference theme, but often when I am at conferences, I find that the keynotes don’t stick afterwards. I think I will remember key takeaways from these.
More on EAHIL to come, so watch this space (as they say) – or rather, just turn on notifications/ RSS to save you the bother 🙂
Last year, I was appointed chair of the International Program Committee for EAHIL 2023. It is a huge responsibility, and I work hard to make sure I can live up to the expectations that come with it.
European Association for Health Information and Libraries (EAHIL) is an organization for health and medical librarians. EAHIL works for collaboration, professional development and exchanging experience and knowledge among health and medical libraries in Europe. There is an event every year, either in form of a workshop or a traditional conference. The workshop format also have traditional conference elements (such as keynotes, oral presentations etc.), but is seeking to be a more informal, more active conference form that enhances networking and knowledge exchange between delegates.
EAHIL 2023 is a workshop and it takes place in Trondheim, Norway from 12-16 June. The theme is somewhat unusual. It is “Radical positive change agents” – a title that comes from a quote by R. David Lankes:
“To be a librarian is not to be neutral, or passive, or waiting for a question. It is to be a radical positive change agent within your community.”
What we want to focus on with this theme is the bigger pictures that form the backdrop of our professional lives. How can we be the change we want to see in our libraries? Is it possible to come together for more sustainable development practices? How can we be more visible and have more impact? How can we be more inclusive and diverse? Who are the real power brokers in our professional world? These are some of the things we want to explore with this theme. There will still be content that can give you practical skills and directly implementable ideas, but we hope that by starting a conversation about the big picture, we can go even further.
The Call for abstracts opened on 15 September, and you can find more information and link to submissions here: https://eahil2023.org/
Karen Marie 