Cross boundaries, join forces - A brief report

Keith Nockels

Cross boundaries, join forces: Nordic Baltic EAHIL/NAMHI workshop.
Oslo, June 2003

EAHIL (the European Association for Health Information and Libraries) organise regular events for health librarians, but this was the first one I had been to. It was organised jointly with the Nordic Association for Medical and Health Information, and held in a hotel on the edge of Oslo, in June.

The title of the conference was interpreted widely, with papers on many subjects and product presentations from the sponsors of the event.

We heard about collaboration between the Medical Library Association (USA) and Latvia, and between the Nordic countries and Lithuania. We also heard about HINARI, a WHO initiative to bring electronic full text journals at low or no cost to developing countries and a project to share epidemiological information in the Baltic and Nordic countries. All of these papers were interesting in the light of our cooperation with Chechnya.

There were papers on nursing information and evidence based nursing, and an interesting discussion about the place of information literacy in the medical curriculum.

We heard too about open archiving and open access journals, with a speaker from Biomedcentral and one from a university in Sweden that is actively promoting open access.

There were also presentations on library chat initiatives - you can contact the National Institute for Working Life library in Sweden (occupational health) and chat with a librarian, as you would contact a chatroom, and, indeed, as you can contact at least one Norwegian television programme. We heard too about the electronic reference services offered by the Deichmanske Bibliotek in Oslo, who you can contact by chat, SMS and email. In the same session we also had a good overview of PDAs and their usefulness in libraries and in health care. Talking to the speaker afterwards (the medical librarian from Cambridge) makes me suspect that we are as far ahead as many UK libraries, with our webpage and PDA and WAP sites.

We had two receptions on the first evening, one in the City Hall, and the other at the medical library at Oslo University, an interesting comparison.

Then there was the social programme, with a boat trip on the Oslofjord, complete with ‘traditional’ prawn supper, and the conference dinner, where we were all made to sit with people we did not know, a very good idea. The conference had only one Scottish representative (and that one not even a Scot!), but several people from England including my very first boss, and many representatives from Sweden, Norway, Finland and the Baltic States.

We are in the process of joining EAHIL as an institutional member, which will give us preferential rates for future events, and enable us to support their excellent work in promoting health information across Europe. Their next meeting is in Santander, Spain, next year. Now, where did I put the Spanish phrasebook….?

The conference presentations are all on the web at http://www.namhi.org/oslo2003.htm, and some photographs will be there soon. But if you want more information that is not on the web, please contact me.

Keith Nockels
Site Services Manager
Medical Library
University of Aberdeen
Direct telephone: (01224) 552740
Email: k.nockels@abdn.ac