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On Thursday 8 and Friday 9 November 2007 health librarians from NSW and beyond will gather at Gosford on the Central Coast for what has become an annual forum - an opportunity to network, catch up, exchange ideas and be inspired in our professional practice.

At Westmead in 2005 we focused on ourselves, with sessions on professional development, career management and how to have fun at work. At St Vincent’s Hospital in 2006 we focused on the electronic information resources we purchase, catalogue, administer and use. At Gosford in 2007 we will be focusing on our users, in particular the techniques and technologies we can use to enhance and add value to the user environment.

Increasing numbers of library users inhabit a Web 2.0 environment both at work and outside work, as they discover and use social software in a collaborative, dynamic and interactive way. Dean Guistini’s recent editorial in the British Medical Journal (Volume 333, 23-30 December 2006, pp.1283-84) highlights the way in which Web 2.0 is changing medicine. “Information pushing devices”, like RSS feeds, permit continuous instant alerting to the latest ideas in medicine…. Multimedia tools like podcasts and videocasts are increasingly popular in medical schools and medical journals…. The notion of a medical wikipedia – freely accessible and continually updated by doctors – is worthy of further exploration. Could wikis be used, for example, as a low cost alternative to commercial point of care tools like UpToDate?”

However our users’ environment also comprises busy wards with not enough PCs, emergency departments with too many patients needing attention, increasing incidence of complex and chronic disease in the community, merged health services encompassing large geographic areas, continuing professional development and so on. As health librarians we need to engage with our users’ physical environment as well as their virtual environment, experimenting with and evaluating new approaches to outreach.

The organisers of the forum aim to have delegates leave with practical ideas that can be implemented in their own libraries to enhance their users’ environment. Contributions from librarians and those working in related fields, both within the health field and beyond, are welcome. Posters are encouraged, particularly as a professional development activity aimed at practitioners with little experience of conference presentations. This forum is an ideal opportunity to “practise” for the 10th International Congress on Medical Librarianship (ICML2009) to be held in Brisbane in 2009.

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