Monday 24th May: McGovern lecture, business meeting and medical informatics
I was up betimes for another run, this time 40 minutes down Connecticut Avenue and round the White House. Then to an NLM sunrise seminar, followed by the Janet Doe lecture, given this year by Rick Forsman from Colorado with the title Life and Death on the Coral Reef: an Ecological Perspective on Scholarly Publishing in the Health Sciences. Being a diver, he applied his understanding of marine ecology to the goings-on in the world of scientific journals. The comparison was perhaps a little over-elaborate, but no one could quarrel with his conclusions, to wit that
1. librarians should thoroughly inform themselves about open access and e-publishing
2. that we should talk to other "organisms" (that is publishers, learned societies, authors and readers...one should note here that the organism analogy falls down here, for these can be more than one of these beasts at the same time, but a shark is always a shark)
3. that we should challenge over-simplifications
4. that we should persuade and influence others
5. and that we should simultaneously pursue principles and practical solutions
Then to the MLA business meeting, where I sat with fellow British delegates, all of us members but confused about our voting rights. I think we should clarify this, certainly before the continuation of the meeting tomorrow when an interesting and controversial motion from Utah suggests that MLA should not take money for any publishers who don't support open access.
I'm afraid I skipped the awards ceremony and lunch in favour of an splendid meal in a nearby Italian restuarant, La Tomate
In the afternoon I went to a medical informatics session on the relationship between informaticians and librarians. Very interesting and I'll post a fuller account when time permits, but there was a very good idea from one chap who was building a database of faculty research interests, the FRIP project at Pittsburgh . To speed up and make it easier for faculty to identify their research interests in a structured way, he and colleagues had mined Medline for their publications harvested the MeSH terms from those articles and then offered those terms back to them as a sort of template for a profile of their research interests. Faculty could then adjust and refine. Brilliant!