Andrea Kenyon

I am delighted to tell you about some exciting opportunities for Chapter member involvement and professional growth. Participating in Chapter activities give members the chance to develop and hone library and leadership skills in a supportive environment.

Committee participation is an excellent way to get involved. We would like to engage more members in helping our new Website Chair, Ene Belleh, enhance the Chapter’s webpages. Have ideas for Chapter programs or continuing education? Do you enjoy planning and organizing events? The Program and Continuing Education Committee Chairs would welcome your assistance. Fundraising and membership cultivation are other areas of Chapter involvement that would benefit the Chapter and provide you with valuable development experience. These are just a few examples of rewarding ways to benefit from Chapter membership.

Another way to get involved is through conference planning. I am pleased to announce that our Chapter will be participating in a joint library health information conference with three other MLA chapters to be held in Baltimore, Maryland in the fall of 2012. Conference participation offers our Chapter members a chance to gain experience submitting posters, serving as presenters and moderators and networking with a larger group of health information professionals. Priscilla Stephenson, Chief of Library Service at the VA, has agreed to serve as the Philadelphia Regional Chapter’s representative to the conference planning team. This is a huge undertaking and many volunteers are needed to help plan and implement the conference. With your help we have every expectation that this conference will be a valuable opportunity for networking, collaboration and professional education. Please contact Priscilla and let her know how you might help with the conference.

I want to personally invite each of you to attend the Philadelphia Regional Chapter’s 60th Annual Meeting and Reception on April 6 at Pennsylvania Hospital, starting at 4 p.m. Program Chair Gary Kaplan has invited a speaker to describe The Public Health Management Corporation’s Community Health Database. The Public Health Management Corporation is a leading nonprofit provider of public health resources. The evening promises to be a very special one in a beautiful, historic setting.

In the last Chronicle, I sought your feedback about the Chapter–what you value as a member and the direction you feel the Chapter needs to go in order to help you on your career path. Questions include: How can we engage you in Chapter activities? How can we engage members outside of Philadelphia? Should we merge with another Chapter? I was hoping to initiate a dialogue. So far I have not been overwhelmed with responses. Please take a moment to reflect on what the Chapter means to you and send me an email at alkenyon@verizon.net

Wishing you a productive and happy spring!

Andrea

Rachel Resnick

My term as Chair of the Communications Committee comes to an end this summer. While I will continue other duties through mid-May, this issue of the Chronicle—my sixteenth as Editor—is my last. There are no plans at this time to continue the publication. The first issue I edited was the winter issue of 2006 (Volume 24, No. 1): <http://mlaphil.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/winter2006.pdf>, taking over from Linda Katz, who had served as Editor for seven years. It has been an honor to serve the Chapter and a pleasure to work with the members of my committee and the Board.

Serving the Chapter gives one more personal exposure to other Chapter members. One discovers more about their personalities, work styles, and lives, and in more intimate settings than during educational activities or large conferences. I certainly have met a few interesting personalities during my tenure, first as proofreader for the Chronicle, then as Committee Chair and Board member. No, I’m not going to name names here—you’ll just have to get involved on a committee and discover all those quirky folks yourself. It’s well worth the effort.

I hope this issue lives up to its reputation. It has been a busy year for programs, with more to come, as Gary Kaplan indicates in his Program Committee Report. Calvin Wang regales us with details about the recent PAFA Anatomy/Academy exhibit tour. Launching this month is the Value of Libraries survey, described by Susan Cavanaugh. Gary also asks us to REGISTER! for our upcoming Annual Meeting (April 6). Speaking of which, get your nominations and applications in to Cynthia McClellan for Chapter grants, awards, and elections, whose winners will be announced at the meeting. Additional events are listed in our ever-present Calendar, edited by Sheryl Panka-Bryman, who also edited Member and Library News, in which she included some news of her own. You can Meet Your Fellow Chapter Member Gerard Regan in this issue in an interview edited by Kate Eckert. Chair Andrea Kenyon asks us to please bring to the Annual Meeting our gently used professional clothes for a worthy cause. More Chapter news comes by way of Priscilla Stephenson regarding a four-chapter conference in 2012. In National news, Anne Seymour provides information about the Chapter Council Roundtables that will be presented at MLA’s 2011 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Minneapolis.  Regarding social media, LinkedIn has issued an improvement to our group that I think you will like. And Carlos Rodriguez returns with his TechnoHumanist views on Mendeley. Read all about it in this issue.

Please consider this a written invitation to share news, views, and information with your fellow chapter members. If you’ve got a blog post just dying to be written, go ahead and write it and post it to the website. Then be sure to promote it via the email list and the LinkedIn group. Did you know that through the magic of the Networked Blogs software, what you post to the website gets automatically posted on the Chapter’s Facebook page? Write one post, get two outlets! And if you promote your post via our LinkedIn group, that post will be searchable on the Internet—even more free publicity for your writing—and your reputation. Your first step is to register for a WordPress account so that you can post to the website: <http://www.mlaphil.org/wp/wp-login.php?action=register>. Information about our other social media is here: <http://www.mlaphil.org/wp/contact/>. Twitter is pretty much reserved for Board members, since there’s a password involved, but if you want to promote something there, send your 140-character or fewer note to a Board member, who can post it for you.

I rest assured that I leave Chapter communications in good hands—yours. Don’t be shy. Get involved.

Best wishes,

Rachel Resnick
Communications Committee Chair, 2009-2011

Gary Kaplan

Mark your calendars to connect with your colleagues on April 6 at the Annual Dinner (details below) and on April 20 at the spring webcast, “Shifting Skills to Navigate the Changing Horizon: Finding Our Way in New Biomedical Research and Health Care Environments.”

Since the last issue of the Chronicle, Chapter members have assembled in November at Jefferson to watch MLA’s e-books webcast, in February at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia for a two-day event on Advocacy for Leaders, produced by the Mid-Atlantic Region Leadership Institute (MAR-LI); and at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to tour the Anatomy/Academy exhibit.

E-Books Webcast

Thirty-two people attended the e-books webcast and wine and cheese reception held at Jefferson on November 10. Many of us were surprised that e-readers and tablets were excluded from the discussion. The stated reason was that the market for medical e-books on these platforms was not far enough along and I tend to agree. Afterwards, I sent attendees a survey regarding their use of e-readers; eighteen people responded:

Do you use an e-reader either personally or professionally?
5 (28%) yes | 13 (72%) no

Do you plan to buy one in the next 6 months?
3 (17%) yes | 15 (83%) no

Of course, this was before the holiday gifting season, recent press on the accelerating sales of e-books, and innovative programs like UC Irvine’s iMedEd Initiative, which has been working closely with Lippincott, Elsevier and third party app developers to bring medical textbooks to the iPad. Stay tuned.

Annual Dinner

Plan to attend the Chapter’s 60th Annual Business Meeting & Reception!  This year’s event will be held on Wednesday, April 6, from 4:00 pm – 8:30 pm at Pennsylvania Hospital. Register by March 25. http://www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaid=217334

• Celebrate your Chapter’s history with material brought to you by Chapter Archives Committee Chair, Annie Brogan
• Donate lightly worn women’s business attire to Dress For Success Philadelphia
• Learn about “The Community Health Data Base: Connecting Local Institutions to Population Data” with our Speaker, Rose Malinowski Weingartner, MPH, a research associate at Public Health Management Corporation <insert photo>
• Recognize the achievements and contributions of your colleagues to the Chapter and the profession
• Tour the Pennsylvania Hospital’s Historic Library, the first medical library in the United States
• Socialize in the elegant Pine Building over a delicious dinner buffet and open bar

Would you like to host an event at your institution? Is there a topic you’d like to see covered? Drop me a line <gary.kaplan@jefferson.edu>. The program committee will work with you to bring continuing education and networking activities from Sussex County, DE to Potter County, PA.

Regards,

Gary Kaplan
Program Chair 2010-2011

The Chapter is soliciting gently used professional clothing and accessories for Dress for Success Philadelphia, which helps disadvantaged women in the Philadelphia region gain employment by providing professional attire. In addition, the organization offers a network of support and the career development tools to help women thrive in work and in life. Each Dress for Success client receives one suit when she has a job interview and can return for a second suit or separates when she finds work. Dress for Success Philadelphia opened its doors on July 1, 2008, and in a very short time has become the second largest suiting program in the world, suiting more than 6,000 low income women who are trying to emerge from poverty.

In this tough economy finding a job can be a very tedious, time consuming process. Even dressing your best for job interview can be expensive, but that’s where Dress for Success comes in. Just by cleaning out your closet, you can help someone land their dream job. Clothing includes interview and work-appropriate separates, including blazers, jackets, shirts, pants and skirts. Professional shoes, jewelry, scarves, handbags, and briefcases are also needed. Please bring your clothing to the Annual Meeting on April 6. A clothing drop-off will be set up near the registration table. If you have questions, please contact Andrea Kenyon, who is coordinating the clothing drive, at alkenyon@verizon.net. To learn more about Dress for Success visit http://www.dressforsuccess.org/affiliate.aspx?pageid=1&sisid=169.

Ms. Holloway attended Bryn Mawr College for two years, then earned her undergraduate degree in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania College for Women in 1945. She earned her MSLS from Drexel in 1950. Prior to joining CPP in 1964, she assisted Dr. Waldo Nelson in editing the journal Pediatrics. The essentials of Lisabeth’s career in Philadelphia comprise many years of service at the College of Physicians and a long stretch as both volunteer librarian and archivist for the Germantown Historical Society and editor of the Society’s Crier. While at the College of Physicians, she created a small guide to medical-historical holdings in Philadelphia which, though done in the 1970s, is still useful. She left CPP in 1977. From 1981-1992, organizing its historical archives and materials, she was Director of the Center for the History of Footcare and Footwear at the Philadelphia College of Podiatric Medicine (PCPM), which is now part of Temple University. She retired to North Carolina in 1992, where she did some freelance editing.

She published a variety of articles dealing with subjects in medical history and medical bibliography, and non-medical local history as well. Eleven of the twelve citations found in this PubMed search were authored or co-authored by Ms. Holloway: <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=Holloway%20LM[Author]&cmd=DetailsSearch>. Switch the search to the NLM Catalog, and you’ll find four books to add to that bibliography. Over 17,000 American physicians are briefly listed in Lisabeth Holloway’s Medical Obituaries: American Physicians’ Biographical Notices in Selected Medical Journals before 1907, 2 vols (New York: Garland, 1981).

Ms. Holloway was active in MLA’s History of Medicine Libraries Group and was the editor of a directory of history of health sciences collections published in the early 1970s, as indicated in a history of the Health Sciences Section, The History of History in Three Acts <http://www.mla-hhss.org/history.html>. In 1975, a separate group for librarians in the history of health sciences was proposed, and Ms. Holloway founded MLA’s Archivists and Librarians in the History of the Health Sciences (ALHHS) group in 1976. She was editor of its publication, Watermark. The group presented Dr. Estelle Brodman with the first Lisabeth M. Holloway Award in 1993 for “outstanding service to the association since its conception and her contributions in significant ways to the development of the organization and to many of its members” (McClure L. “Lisabeth Holloway Award.” Watermark. 1993;16(3):41, cited by McClure LW. A student of history: perspectives on the contributions of Estelle Brodman. J Med Libr Assoc. 2008 Jul;96(3):255-61. <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2479061/#mlab-96-03-15-McClure1>)

Many thanks to Ms. Holloway’s son George and to Dr. Steve Peitzman for their assistance. As a student, Dr. Peitzman worked for Lisabeth when she was Curator at CPP, and remained a friend of the family. The two also co-authored several articles on local medical history, published in the Germantown Crier.