Happy New Year: Region 7’s 2025 Recap

Posted by kimberlycarlo on January 5th, 2026 Posted in: Blog

---

Happy New Year from Region 7 of the NNLM!
Throughout 2025, our team has achieved so many successes. This blog post does not encompass all the work we have done throughout 2025. However, it highlights some of our impactful moments. We look forward to continuing to serve Region 7 throughout 2026 and beyond.

Sarah has hosted a panel called “Graphic Medicine in Public Libraries.” Panelists who work in public libraries discuss challenges and opportunities, developing a collection, insight into cataloguing and promoting these collections, and more. If interested, you can watch the recording here. Another impressive program put together by Sarah was the “Discovering Library Science and Health Literacy: A High School Push-in Program.” This recording shares insight into the importance of attracting students during high school into the field of librarianship. The curriculum designed with high school students in mind is shared in the recording. The panelists also discuss equipping teens with health literacy skills. This program will be most helpful to educators who work with high school students.

Bennie put together an informative session on “Cultivating a Grief-Sensitive Community through Library and Community-Based Partnerships.” Panelists discuss how libraries and their partnerships can fill in the gaps of services that surround grief support. Resources are shared as well. You can watch the recording here. Bennie has also collaborated with Shanna Hastie to put together a class called “Connecting Older Adults to Health Information.” This class evaluates data of those who are part of the older adult population, identifies resources to meet the information needs of this group, and develops ideas for programs to address the health information needs of this population.

Margot hosted a debrief session about this year’s MLA conference. Those hospital librarians who attended the debrief session were able to share their experiences at the conference. This includes those who attended the conference in person or virtually. In a collective space, hospital librarians were able to compile the insights most relevant to their work from the conference. This also assists those hospital librarians who were unable to attend, allowing them to learn about the topics shared at the conference. If you are interested, you can watch this debrief session here.

Region 7, along with regions 5 and 6, collaborated on cleaning up the FREESHARE group in DOCLINE, a multi-year project. At the time of this blog post, there are 924 members. Members of the FREESHARE Library Group lend to other FREESHARE libraries at no cost. If you would like to participate, contact Margot Malachowski (Margot.Malachowski@umassmed.edu). To participate, your library must provide non-cost interlibrary loans for other FREESHARE members, and your library has the capacity to lend and borrow in equal measure.

As for myself, I was able to host my first live “Region 7 Presents” on data librarianship. I was able to interview three data librarians who discussed their accomplishments in the field, what they do at their institutions, and resources for those who are interested in this growing field of librarianship. You can find that on YouTube here. I also presented at the North Atlantic Health Sciences Libraries 2025 annual conference, where I shared my successes and how I could transform this panel into future webinars and teaching opportunities for attendees and myself. Another highlight of my year was collaborating with NCDS to put together a four-part series called “Pathways to Data Services.” You can find these recordings on the NNLM YouTube channel here.

I also want to give a special shoutout to Region 7’s Associate Director, Jessica Kilham. Not only has she been a great mentor and leader, but she also does a fantastic job keeping us on track to cultivate connections with other libraries and to tend to our priority areas and communities of interest (which you can learn more about here).

Here’s to another year of collaboration and furthering our collection of educational resources here at Region 7 of the NNLM!