MLA Medical Informatics Section (MIS)
2002 Annual Business Meeting, Dallas, TX
Minutes of the meeting of Tuesday, May 21, 2002

Attending:(sheet routed)

Welcome/Introductions. Gail Persily asked everyone to introduce himself or herself. Gail then asked for comments on the minutes for last year’s meeting. Martin Brennan noted that he agreed to take over as website editor at that meeting. The minutes from the 2000 Business Meeting were approved with this single correction.

Reports:

• Chair's report. Gail thanked everyone for their assistance during the past year. The activities for the year are described in the annual report. The section is sponsoring two programs for the annual meeting which are detailed in the Program Chair’s report below. With the Molecular Biology and Genomics SIG, we co-sponsored an electronic journal club on Bioinformatics. Gail had hoped to get a second journal club going on Knowledge Management, but was unable to do so. Nunzia Giuse said that someone from her staff could probably do that for this coming year. Gail was asked by the Continuing Education Committee to serve as our section’s liaison to the Technology Continuing Education Credential Task Force. Gail contributed significantly to the work of that task force, which has resulted in a document recommending goals and scope of a Digital Library CE Credential.

• Secretary/Treasurer's report. We have a healthy treasury with almost $33,000. Since January, the activity in the Treasury is as follows:

  $ 4,708.97	Total dues
  $ 275.00	Web hosting fee (to MLA)
  $1,000.00	MIS/MLA Career Development Grant
  $182.53	2001 Business Meeting Refreshments
  $ 6.80	Stamps
  $ 511.31	2001 Symposium

• Section Council. Elizabeth Connor’s report follows:

Section Council met on 5/18/02 and will meet again on 5/21/02. This report includes several informational items and some issues that require the input and opinions of the MIS.

1. Section Council will vote for Vice Chair of Section Council. The candidates are Dixie Jones (Research) and Catherine Wolfson (Relevant Issues).
2. Several name change votes were ratified during the meeting. These name changes were discussed on our section listserv, were passed, and now the council requires ratification.
   --Clinical Librarians SIG is now called Evidence-Based Health Care SIG
   --Complementary Medicine SIG is now call Complementary & Alternative Medicine SIG
   --Medical Societies is now called Health Association Libraries Section
3. A member of Section Council made a motion to disband the Section Program Planners Issues Committee (ad hoc) of Section Council. Discussions included the virtues of this committee being ad hoc versus standing versus being a task force. Most people think this work is important but differ in their opinions of how the work can be accomplished in the short- and long-term.
4. Draft standards of the Hospital Libraries Section will be voted upon by HLS, the Section Council, and the Board. Any comments or concerns?
5. The Collection Development Section has proposed changes to the criteria for awarding the Daniel T. Richards Award.
6. Section Council developed a new logo and bookmark. Samples of the logo and bookmark were distributed to MIS members attending the MIS business meeting.
7. Of the many Section Council committee reports, two are notable:
   --Credentialing - by September 2002, AHIP members renewing at the same level will not have to submit documentation of their activities, just the application form and application fee.
   --MLANET - the motion to waive MLANET hosting fees for Section Web content was passed by Section Council, amended by the Board and now a task force has been charged by the Board to make implementation recommendations.
8. Sections are reminded to send Section content to the Section Editor of MLA News.
9. Related to the Issues, Challenges, Choices document created by the Board, sections are asked to report international initiatives to Section Council.
10. It was suggested at Section Council that sections evaluate their own conference programming. MIS members made several suggestions including kiosk, CGI evaluations, standardizing evaluations in Section Council, and starting a discussion about this on our section listserv.
11. Carla Funk spoke briefly about the informationist conference, online courses, and expert searching task force. Section Council suggested that MLANET improve the online MLA directory to serve as a resource for building an electronic portfolio, tracking CE activities, committee memberships, etc., to facilitate AHIP renewals and so forth. Carla Funk was cool to this idea, citing privacy concerns. Other Section Council members expressed concern about getting accurate memberships lists, and again, Carla Funk was concerned that vendor/MLA members would use this information for commercial purposes.
    Nunzia Giuse suggested that Eskind Library at Vanderbilt use their expertise to develop this electronic portfolio as a pilot concept for the Medical Informatics Section.
12. Of the persons elected by sections to serve as candidates to the MLA Nominating Committee, Section Council votes for six persons. In addition to voting for Ruth Riley, the Medical Informatics Section nominee, input was requested for the other nominees.

• Program Chair. The two programs sponsored by our section were:
  A contributed paper session on Knowledge Management co-sponsored by the Technical Services, Medical Library Education, Electronic Media & Technology, and Medical Societies sections and the African American Librarians Alliance SIG.
  An invited speakers panel on Electronic Records Management, co-sponsored by the History of the Health Sciences, Educational Media and Technology, and Technical Services sections.
  We are also co-sponsoring a program led by the Hospital Libraries section called “PDAs and Pocket PCs: Uses and Issues.”
  Nunzia Giuse discussed the session today (May 21—3-4, Knowledge Management); the Informatics Section was the lead sponsor. It was well attended and the room was crowded. The program went well and was well received.
  Vanderbilt’s Eskind Library is willing to provide a Knowledge Management Tool developed in-house to build a resource to share members’ expertise. (This would be housed on Eskind’s web site.)
  Nunzia reported that The Knowledge Management session received over 20 excellent papers for review but due to space limitations only fit 5 on the final program. Nunzia would like to see MLA adopt a different system for reviewing papers that would be more fair to people submitting abstracts.

• Website Editor. Martin Brennan reported that he has just started to work with the website. He is doing minor modifications and will keep David’s design. He solicited ideas for enhancement of the website. The group agreed that historical information like bylaws and annual reports should be available on the web site on an archive page. Since the files are still available, this should be easy to do.

• Professional Development Liaison. Gail reported that Zoe Stravri would like to continue as the Liaison and to continue work to expand the Self-education Research Project started by Kris Alpi.

• Governmental Relations Liaison.Nancy Roederer will continue as the Liaison.

• Nominating Committee. The Nominating Committee consisted of Zoe Stavri (chair), Kellie N. Kaneshiro, and Ruth A. Riley. 480 ballots were sent out and 85 returned. Jean Sayre is our new chair-elect. We have also nominated Ruth Riley as our nominee to the MLA Nominating Committee.

• Membership Committee.There are 498 members. The committee set up a PDA friendly version of the membership brochure. Shawn Manning asked Wallace McClenden, Karen Crowell, and Lynn Eades for technical support for this venture. Since there will be beaming stations at 2003, we may use them to push the brochure to potential members. We could use this mechanism to list sponsored programs, the business meeting, etc. during next year’s meeting.
  The listserv was a topic of concern. The list does not include all members, there are many incorrect addresses, and there are people on the list who are not MLA members. The group agreed that the list should remain an open list (for recruitment purposes). The task of clean up was delegated to the Membership Committee, chaired by Shawn Manning. Marie Asher agreed to help with this work. As a part of the clean-up question, we should also clarify the support MLA gives with the list. We need to ask if MLA keeps the list up-to-date—though apparently they don’t.

• Career Development Award.Jie Li reported the amount was increased to $1500 and MLA approved this increase. Announcements were sent out about the awards in early October. These announcements went to MED-LIB, the MLA listserv, and chapter chairs were asked to post. In November, a follow-up reminder message was sent. There were 8 applicants, 4 were degree-seeking applicants and they were not considered. The honorees are:

1. Mary Linn Bergstrom
   Mary Linn Bergstrom is the head of Biomedical Library Education and Outreach Services of University of California San Diego. She will use the MIS/MLA Career Development grant to attend a Computer Assisted Medical Decision Making course at Stanford University and 2002 AMIA Annual Symposium.

2. Marilyn Teolis
   Marilyn Teolis is the medical library coordinator at the Baptist Hospital in Nashville Tennessee. Marilyn serves her medical staff's information needs in part by hospital's digital library and believes that personal digital assistant technology is a logical extension of the digital library. She will use the MIS/MLA Career Development grant to buy two PalmaIIx units with unlimited Palm to improve health professionals' understanding of the clinical value of wireless handheld devices as well as increase her own experience with PDAs to assist with the physician committee investigating handheld devices.
   The increase in the amount did increase the number of applicants for projects.

Old Business

• Bylaws Revision. Section council representative has changed to allow an overlap; currently there is a gap. There were some other changes as well. Since the changes were not sent out 30 days before our meeting, we’ll need to vote on them next year at the annual meeting. We will send out the changes via an e-mail shortly.

New Business

Goals and Objectives for 2002

Nunzia will prepare in light of the MLA Goals and Objectives

PDA's. During this meeting we were able to beam the PDA member brochure to others. PDA Content for the ’03 meeting was discussed and it was agreed that it should be limited to Medical Informatics section sponsored events, if it is not too time consuming to make this available.

2003 Annual Meeting Program: Jean Sayre, as chair-elect, is responsible for the 2003 meeting program. Jean attended meetings about the 2003 meeting and explained that they are planning fewer sessions, during concurrent sessions papers will have a common time frame so that people may move to alternative sessions, and papers that were not accepted will not be automatically sent to the poster sessions. We will be limited to 2 sessions that we can sponsor but we may co-sponsor others. A few of the ideas for the program were: technology forecasting, public health informatics programming. Because of our broad appeal, we can co-sponsor sessions with many sections.

Reported by Beth Layton

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