Apr

Professional Development Award: Kathryn Vela-St. Luke’s Health System

Posted in: #CC/Academic List, #Health Interest List, #Health Sciences List, #Public/K-12 List, All Members

My name is Kathryn Vela and I am currently a medical librarian at St. Luke’s Health System where one of my core responsibilities is collection development. I have worked as a health sciences librarian for five years, but collection development is still a relatively new area for me. In addition, the collection in my library is in the process of being updated for the first time in several years!

I received funding from the NNLM Region 4 to attend the virtual Electronic Resources and Libraries (ER&L) conference to connect with colleagues who have similar responsibilities and gain valuable insights into how I can improve the collection at my hospital in meaningful ways.

The ER&L conference was held from March 14-16 and was themed around a summer camp; the conference program was organized around a camp map, and many presenters included the theme in their presentations. The conference organizers even sent attendees a small backpack with camp-themed goodies!

The program was full of interesting and informative presentations and was easy to navigate with different tracks for e-resources management & licensing, collection development & assessment, organizational strategies, external relationships, user experience and promotion, and scholarly communications and library publishing. For ER&L newbies like me, there was also an ER&L 101 track.

Aside from the tracks, some common themes emerged from the programming around DEI and accessibility. There was a strong focus on ensuring that electronic resources were representative and respectful of our diverse communities, and that they were discoverable and usable regardless of ability. There were also a number of interesting presentations on how to use collection data to both make budgetary decisions and to demonstrate library value.

As a new collection development librarian, the information I learned from my peers during this conference has been invaluable. My to-do list has doubled in size as I’ve added new projects based on things I’ve seen at ER&L, like assessing the accessibility of our electronic resources and analyzing our collection data in new ways. I can’t wait to share what I’ve learned with my colleagues and start to implement these new ideas to further update our collection!

PHOTOS

Me at my desk getting ready to dive into the conference material