MAC - Part 4 "Cleaning Up"

There a couple of little things still left to share. The Association of North Carolina Health and Science Librarians' (http://www.rtpnet.org/~anchasl/) reception on Wednesday evening, October 10 was lots of fun. I was the only person out of the group of 20 or so that has ever ridden a camel! Everyone eventually won a prize and then came announcements, like the group's annual meeting on Friday, November 30 in Chapel Hill. Being a history person, it sounds exciting since the group will celebrate its 25th anniversary including a presentation on the history of the medical library as well as honoring past presidents. Margaret Cobb, librarian at Forsyth Medical Center, will wrap up the day.

On Thursday, I was eating again at the Marketing Your Services roundtable discussion hosted by Shannon Jones of Virginia Commonwealth University. The group of 10 shared the different ways that they market their services either in an academic medical or hospital library. I shared our service, if we're still doing it, of delivering public interest magazines to various patient floor lobbies with a simple label on the front that says: Compliments of Coy C. Carpenter Library and Dorothy Carpenter Medical Archives. The hospital librarians especially like this idea as a way to recycle donated magazines. Some ideas I heard about were:
*sending announcements of classes/lectures to departmental listserves (VCU's departments have their own listserves)
*bringing in federal health officials like Center For Disease Control employees for free, targeted classes
*using www.publichealthgrandrounds.unc.edu for continuing education credit courses
*grabbing all the freebies at conferences to share with patrons
*partnering/collaborating with other departments on campus for programs

To wipe it up, I would say I enjoyed the conference. While I don't consider myself a "true" academic medical center librarian, I still felt like I had several things in common with the MAC group and it was nice to network and meet some hospital librarians, including Ms. Cobb. I am glad I had the opportunity to represent Carpenter Library at the conference.