Terena Solomons, Research Librarian/Senior Librarian, Curtin University/ University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia

Presenting at EAHIL 2023 in Norway was an incredible experience for personal and professional growth and provided invaluable benefits that virtual platforms simply cannot replicate. The 20+ hour flight from Perth in Australia to Trondheim in Norway to attend EAHIL was definitely worthwhile as the event offered a diverse array of f2f interactive learning experiences and fostered connections with like-minded professionals.

The highlight for me was networking and socialising with like-minded librarians from around the world, as represented in this photo taken after the Tuesday CEC workshops with librarians from Australia, Canada, Norway USA and UK.

After attending EAHIL via zoom from Australia in 2020 & 2021 I was delighted that the 2023 EAHIL workshop was being held in-person in Norway. When I discovered the subtheme‘New and expanding roles for positive change: learning new things  building new skillsets’ I submitted an abstract for an oral presentation about the skillsets I’ve developed working on Scoping Reviews and Evidence Summaries with nursing academics at the Western Australian Group for Evidence-Informed Healthcare Practice – a JBI Centre of Excellence.

I was so excited when I received the email advising my abstract had been accepted and that my oral presentation was scheduled for the Wednesday morning straight after the keynote. Murphy’s law it was halfway through my presentation that everyone’s mobile phones started beeping as part of the Norwegian National Emergency Alert System https://www.emergencyalert.no/test-of-the-emergency-alert-system/

Thankfully the conference organisers had given everyone the heads up about this event and so I kept calm and carried on with my presentation.

EAHIL’s diverse range of speakers and workshops broadened my knowledge in many areas and highlighted the global nature of our profession. 2 key takeaways are:

• Epistemonikos – a free database that includes records from Medline, Embase and CINAHL. There are differences in search results when searching Title/Abstract via the free text box and via drop down menu options
• Search Summary Table to identify which databases included studies for systematic or scoping reviews come from.

Author: Terena Solomons, Research Librarian/Senior Librarian, Curtin University/ University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia