Igor Brbre and Tom Roper, our Clinical Librarians, recently attended the European Association for Health Information and Libraries (EAHIL) workshop in Basel. They presented a Continuing Education Course, Tips and Tricks for Clinical Librarians, to a group including delegates from Poland, Estonia, Germany, Switzerland and France, all of whom are considering setting up clinical librarian services.
In addition they attended sessions over the four days of the workshop, including ones on teaching evidence-based medicine, governance, programming for data management, machine learning and artificial intelligence in resource discovery, open access and sharing search strategies.
Perhaps the sessions which will have the greatest relevance for their work back home were one on using EndNote for deduplication of massive sets of search results, one on techniques for searching for qualititative studies and the various applications of artificial intelligence in subject and resource discovery.
They also attended meetings of special interest groups, the newly-formed Evidence Based Medicine group, the Training, Education and Development for Medical Information and Library professionals group, known by its appropriate initials as TrEDMIL, and the MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) group, where a representative of the US National Library of Medicine briefed us on the changes coming to PubMed in the autumn.
As well as this, there were the social activities associated with the conference, a welcome reception at Basel’s Wildt’sches Haus am Petersplatz and a conference dinner at which delegates were entertained by one of Basel’s Fasnacht (carnival) Cliques, not unlike Lewes’s bonfire societies. The Dean of Medicine of Basel University, in his welcome to delegates recommended swimming in the Rhine, but the currents were very strong and the Basel police advised the contrary.
