Introducing our New Coordinators!

Posted by seancorning on July 7th, 2021 Posted in: Announcements, Blog

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We are happy to welcome Bennie Finch and Sean Corning as our two new Education and Research Coordinators. We are excited to have them on board! Bennie Finch will introduce herself today, and Sean Corning will introduce themself in a future post.

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Hi! My name is Bennie Finch (she/her) and I am one of the new Education and Outreach Coordinators here in Region 7. I am so excited to be joining the Network of the National Library of Medicine at this exciting time.

I just completed a MLIS in May 2021 from Southern Connecticut State University. I also bring to my work, my experience engaging with children and families as a clinical social worker and in early childhood education as an infant mental health consultant for many years.

It is hard to narrow down my focus because I enjoy learning about so many things, but I am particularly interested in public libraries, consumer health information, and library and community partnerships.

I had the wonderful opportunity of interning with NNLM during the Fall of 2020. During that time, my work focused on the #CiteNLM Campaign helping to host a Wikipedia Virtual Edit-a-thon which focused on maternal and child health. My primary work with this was in recruiting LIS students to participate in the edit-a-thon in which we added citations from trusted health resources to existing health related Wikipedia articles. This was really fun and provided an opportunity to engage with other students and health science librarians from around the United States. I also helped with the initial phases of creating a learning module which LIS faculty can use to engage students in practicing their reference skills by adding citations to and editing Wikipedia health topic pages. The module has also been adapted for use with all types of libraries interested in learning to edit Wikipedia. We are looking for a few volunteers (LIS Schools or libraries) to pilot the Program Module, so please reach out if you are interested in learning more.

I am looking forward to working with you all!