An excellent and brilliantly organised conference

Rebecca Siân Jones, Liaison Librarian (Medicine) and Library Manager (Charing Cross), Library Services, Imperial College London, UK

In June, I was luckily able to attend the EAHIL Conference in Riga. I attended after seeing lots of interesting (to me!) tweets about literature searching come out of previous years’ conferences. I was also successful at applying to talk about my MEd project about the online Community of Practice that the Medicine Liaison Librarians at Imperial College London have set up in Microsoft Teams to help people as they do their evidence synthesis reviews at the university. The conference is split into talks (people are put into themes with each talk lasting 15 minutes) workshops and keynote lectures. Despite being put in a group that was talking at 9am we still had people turn up to listen! I also had quite a few questions from people in the session as well as watching online and others talked to me afterwards about the practicalities of doing the same thing at their institution.

I learned lots of interesting things while at the conference. I especially liked a three-lesson course that is being done at the Universities of Calgary and Canada about evidence synthesis reviews. It has inspired me to try to do something similar at my institution – and they’ve nicely put their lesson plans and slides online to make doing this even easier! In his closing keynote, Andrea Alessandro Gasparini linked to this website which is listing all the AI tools to help teaching and learning in Higher Education and this is something that I know that I will keep returning to. Other particular points of interest were Kristīne Pabērza-Ramiresa encouraging us to consider our impact measures, the many mentions of the importance of considering the environmental impact of libraries and the workshop about emotional labour in library work.

The conference took place in the National Library of Latvia on the banks of the Daugava River. Its nickname is the Castle of Light and it is seen as a lighthouse of culture for the country. It was a beautiful venue for the conference. I was really impressed by how the organisers had also arranged for our evening social events to be at various venues around Riga such as the Museum of Anatomy, the Museum of the History of Riga & Navigation and The House of the Black Heads. Altogether, I thought this was an excellent and brilliantly organised conference and have recommended it to other health librarians.