Abstract
Over the years, health sciences librarians have been change agents, leading the charge on issues of importance to the profession and the communities we serve. From its founding in 1898 with the Exchange, the Medical Library Association (MLA) has been dedicated to improving access to health information. In 2003, the Board of Directors published a statement supporting open access to information generated from federally funded scientific and medical research and maintained that having access to timely, relevant, and accurate information is vital to the health of the nation and its education and research programs. At some financial risk, the association made the Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA) open access and published the entire archive of JMLA and its predecessor, the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, in PubMed Central. Nearly two decades later, the promise of open access and open science finally seems to be coming to fruition. In the 2020 Janet Doe Lecture, Chris Shaffer, AHIP, described the ways that MLA has led the profession, standing behind a shared vision and “walking the walk.” In challenging listeners to embrace open science, he affirmed that, as leaders in improving access to health sciences information since 1898, medical librarians must work in the open science arena to realize our vision “that quality information is essential for improved health.”
Highlights
Thank you for the gracious introduction, Gerald (Jerry) Perry, AHIP, FMLA
As a queer librarian living in San Francisco, it was very gratifying to learn more about the work that you did to support the communities and individuals who suffered during the HIV/AIDS pandemic in your lecture, “The Activist Health Sciences Librarian” [1]
As a child of the 1960s and 1970s who grew up listening to the protest songs of folk music, I was inspired by my mentor Elaine Russo Martin, FMLA, who called us to embrace social justice medical librarianship in her Janet Doe Lecture at the 2018 annual meeting [2]
Summary
Thank you for the gracious introduction, Gerald (Jerry) Perry, AHIP, FMLA. As a queer librarian living in San Francisco, it was very gratifying to learn more about the work that you did to support the communities and individuals who suffered during the HIV/AIDS pandemic in your lecture, “The Activist Health Sciences Librarian” [1]. Dr Ana introduced me to medical librarianship in graduate school at the University of North Texas; Elaine was director of the Library of the Health Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where I took my first job following library school; and my “frolleague” Jerry welcomed me to the LGBT Special Interest Group (the “SIG”) at my first Medical Library Association (MLA) meeting. I am honored to follow in your footsteps and those of the many wonderful librarians who have stood before me at previous annual meetings to speak on the history or philosophy of medical librarianship. The Janet Doe Lecture in history or philosophy of medical librarianship, presented at the MLA ’20 vConference, the virtual 120th Annual Meeting of the Medical Library Association; August 10–14, 2020. Gerald (Jerry) Perry, AHIP, FMLA, the 2019 Janet Doe lecturer, gave the introduction
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