What we talk about when we talk about medical librarianship: an analysis of Medical Library Association annual meeting abstracts, 2001-2019.

Bethany Myers

doi:10.5195/jmla.2020.836

Abstract

Objective:This study seeks to gain initial insight into what is talked about and whose voices are heard at Medical Library Association (MLA) annual meetings.Methods:Meeting abstracts were downloaded from the MLA website and converted to comma-separated values (CSV) format. Descriptive analysis in Python identified the number of presentations, disambiguated authors, author collaboration, institutional affiliation type, and geographic affiliation. Topics were generated using Mallet's Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm for topic modeling.Results:There were 5,781 presentations at MLA annual meetings from 2001–2019. Author disambiguation resulted in approximately 5,680 unique authors. One thousand ninety-three records included a hospital-related keyword in the author field, and 4,517 records included an academic-related keyword. There were 438 presentations with at least 1 international author. The topic model identified 16 topics in the MLA abstract corpus: events, electronic resources, publications, evidence-based practice, collections, academic instruction, librarian roles and relationships, technical systems, special collections, general instruction, literature searching, surveys, research support, community outreach, patient education, and library services.Conclusions:Academic librarians presented more frequently than hospital librarians, though more research should be done to determine if this discrepancy was disproportionate to hospital librarians' representation in MLA. Geographic affiliation was concentrated in the United States and appeared to be related to population density. Health sciences librarians in the early twenty-first century are spending more time at MLA annual meetings talking about communities, relationships, and visible services, and less time talking about library collections and operations. Further research will be needed to boost the participation of underrepresented members.

Highlights

Professional conferences enable librarians and library staff to share projects, trends, resources, and ideas; network with their colleagues; and build relationships
Meeting abstracts were downloaded from the Medical Library Association (MLA) website, which had portable document format (PDF) versions of meeting programs
The PDF files were converted to text format using PDFMiner [10] and transformed into comma-separated values (CSV) format using Notepad++ [11]

Summary

Introduction

Professional conferences enable librarians and library staff to share projects, trends, resources, and ideas; network with their colleagues; and build relationships. The Medical Library Association (MLA) annual meeting gathers together thousands of health information professionals to create presentations, posters, lightning talks, and special content sessions; to meet with their caucus communities; and to receive updates from the association, the National Library of Medicine, and publishers and vendors. MLA has a peer-reviewed journal, the Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA), previously known as the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association (BMLA). Research suggests that librarians are more likely to present at a conference than publish a peer-reviewed article [2, 3]. Librarians receive regular calls for submissions from local and national conferences, and each MLA annual meeting needs hundreds of presentations for several days’ worth of meeting content. Some institutions do Journal of the Medical Library Association

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Discussion

Conclusion