European Association for Health Information and Libraries (EAHIL) Workshop 2001: Cyberspace Odyssey

Citation

Comba, V. (2001), "European Association for Health Information and Libraries (EAHIL) Workshop 2001: Cyberspace Odyssey", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 18 No. 9. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2001.23918iac.001

European Association for Health Information and Libraries (EAHIL) Workshop 2001: Cyberspace Odyssey

Alghero, Italy, June 7-9, 2001

Valentina Comba

All the participants at this workshop were really happy and satisfied. The only complaint was "the fact that throughout the conference the sun shone from early morning to late evening and immediately after the conference, when I had three days to tour around, it started to rain!", writes editor Sally Wood-Lamont in the August 2001 issue of the EAHIL Newsletter.

This workshop, the first European event based in Italy since the Bologna Conference in 1988, was very carefully organized, beginning in 1998, by the Local Organizing Committee and the Scientific Committee and was truly an international undertaking with members from the UK, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Israel, Switzerland and Italy (see http://medicina.unica.it/alghero2001/sco.htm). The European Association for Health Information and Libraries usually organizes the Conference every two years (in 2000 it was merged with the London International Conference on Medical Librarianship) with the workshop being held in the odd years, trying to alternate south-north and east-west locations in Europe. Thus, Italy was the choice for 2001.

My colleagues and I have tried to do our best: best location, best premises, best food, best program, best speakers .. . We didn't expect to be recognized for the best weather, but we were just lucky.

Now, as the workshop is over, we can really say that it has been really successful, both by the participants' attendance and evaluations with 228 registrants from 25 countries (Registration reflected participants from the following countries: Italy 87; the UK 32; Norway 17; Spain 13; Czech Republic eight; France, Hungary and Finland seven each; Sweden and Denmark six each; Germany and the USA five each; The Netherlands, Slovenia and Belgium four each; Switzerland three; Portugal, Estonia, Israel and Romania two each; and one each from Ireland, Lithuania, Australia, New Zealand, and the Ukraine) and by the high quality of the speakers and their papers. At the Opening Ceremony Tony McSean, President of EAHIL and Eve-Marie Lacroix, Director of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and Chair of the Medical Library Association (MLA) International Cooperation Section, were among many other distinguished persons on the dais.

The Program had three plenary sessions covering the following themes:

• •

  "The Librarian as gatekeeper for scientific information".

• •

  "Resources on the Internet".

• •

  "The remote user".

All sessions opened with an invited speech. The Workshop inauguration included a keynote lecture by Professor Silvio Hénin about the history of computing, "From number crunching to information technology and beyond", and closed with an exciting presentation by Fiona Godlee, Editorial Director of BioMedCentral, about open archives and the peer review process.

A number of posters were presented, all very interesting and the best was selected and awarded a prize sponsored by the Italian bookseller DEA. The Lecture, the invited papers, submitted papers and posters are now in the proceedings site of the conference at: http://pacs.unica.it/alghero2001/proceedings/indice.htm

It must be mentioned that the small but fundamental exhibition, where the most important commercials in the biomedical area were present with representation by publishers, providers and vendors including Dialog, SilverPlatter, Ovid, EBSCO, Lippincott, SwetsBlackwell, had a chance also to present their services in a product review session.

The most important financial support for the Workshop was given by four promoting institutions:

1. 1.

   the Italian Library Association (AIB) Sardinia Section;

2. 2.

   the British Library;

3. 3.

   the Association of Italian Pharmaceutical Information Professionals (GIDIF, RBM ­ Gruppo Italiano Documentalisti Industria Farmaceutica e Istituti di Ricerca Biomedica); and

4. 4.

   the Emilia-Romagna Authority for Culture and Libraries (known in Italian as Soprintendenza per i Beni Librari e Documentari della Regione Emilia-Romagna).

As President of the Organizing and Scientific Committees, I am particularly proud of the quality and quantity of work we were able to perform as "remote committee members", as we utilized software on the Web to collect, read, evaluate, select and classify in the right session the abstracts and papers sent in response to the call for papers. There were nearly 80 submissions and just 18 of them were accepted as oral presentations. Most of the rejected papers were accepted as posters. The review system allowed us to work together even at a distance, encouraging some important advantages like saving money not needed for extra travel to meetings, and the collaboration among the best reviewers from different countries. I wish to acknowledge Beniamino Orru, Librarian at the School of Medicine of Cagliari in Sardinia, for his perfect management of the software, the Web pages and the contacts with the local authorities.

My short report would not be complete without mentioning the wonderful location of the Conference at the Hotel Calabona in Alghero and the care taken by my colleagues on all aspects of the organization, ranging from the Conference budget to the music choice for the start of the session (we couldn't do without the sound-track of "2001 Space Odyssey"!) We are all obliged to Vanna Pistotti at the Mario Negri Library, Italy and Italian Cochrane Center, and Manuela Colombi from the Janssen Cilag Documentation Center and EAHIL Past President, who as members of the Local Committee worked very hard to achieve the perfect success of the Conference.

The Workshop site is still up at: http://medicina.unica.it/alghero2001/main.htm with some wonderful images of Sardinia. Please, have a look and think about the conference and that you were there.

Valentina Comba(valentina.comba@unito.it) is Director of Academic Libraries at the University of Turin, Italy.