Themes

Our profession has evolved over the last couple of years, especially because of new technologies and developments like Artificial Intelligence (AI). Where personal contact used to be the norm, we have experienced, partly due to the Covid 19-crisis, that contact with colleagues and clients can be done digitally and offers new opportunities. But in addition to these new opportunities such as working from home and easily holding international meetings, it also raises many new questions. In a world where health information specialists face new challenges in the development of new skills, accumulating traditional tasks with new activities, wouldn’t it be important to think about local and international networks to face the great changes in the world of health information? How has our professional and personal welfare evolved over the last couple of years? How have the past conferences and workshops of the EAHIL contributed to us personally as well as professionally?

Librarians and scientific information service departments are on the cutting edge of research and innovation. Information specialists can play a big role in (research) data management, whether it is in data curatorship, metadata, data & text mining, open data & open science, data organisation, copyright & intellectual property of data, or other. Access to (clinical) data provides valuable information to set up new clinical studies and treatment insights or measure methods. How do we analyse these (clinical) data? Which data driven tools are used to measure research impact? Are health organisations data driven? How to manage the collaboration with industry and knowledge institutions to scale up?

Systematic reviews (SRs) are research methods in their own right; their results play a key role in health care delivery and medical research. As SRs have increased in importance, so has the science of this method become more sophisticated, requiring more collaboration between the librarian and health researchers during the review process. And what is the future of SRs? What do we have to know about different types of reviews (i.e. rapid re-views, realist reviews, living reviews)? How can we promote the role of librarians as part of the SR-team and should information specialists be present on a SR-research team. How can librarians guarantee that search strategies have been carefully reviewed, reproduced, and updated until the final publication of the systematic review? Tools within the search process, (i.e. developing search strategy, deduplication). How can we combine new tech-nology (i.e. AI, text mining) and the librarian to make the most of support in SR? What are the core competencies within searching (i.e. search strategies, thesaurus, search filters)? How and where could librarians acquire these competencies? Can librarians contribute to other stages of the systematic review process (i.e. data extraction, quality analysis, meta-analysis)?

As medical librarians and health information specialists, we are historically involved in supporting the development of information literacy skills. We support researchers,
teachers, students, and other health professionals, and encourage and motivate them to develop those skills in an ever increasing information-intensive environment. The medical and health profession today does not only need to search databases, repositories and registers for information, but also needs to be able to interpret and process the located information and data. In order to do this, those professionals draw upon their data literacy and technology literacy skills and expertise, as well as information literacy proficiency. We play a role in the development of those skills by giving guidance, educating, and supporting. In this role we seek to motivate our public to continue to grow; we encourage them to learn and discover. How can we improve collaboration between health information specialists and professors for the integration of health information literacy skills in the medical curriculum? How do we ensure the training of health professionals in information literacy? How do we motivate health professionals to develop programs, projects, models, and intervention strategies in information literacy in response to community needs?

More than ever before the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us the importance of access to health research, as well as the importance of international collaboration and dissemination of research. In a world where we have information at our fingertips, and anyone can publish online, what can we do to support critical thinking? What happens when health information is politicised and results in division and fear? What role can libraries and health information specialists play? We have experienced the use of preprints – what are their uses and problems? What is going on in publishing and open access, as well as predatory open access? What are the possibilities of measuring and rating impact, especially on social media?

Everything you can think of relating to the EAHIL purposes, but not easy to include in any other theme. Something interesting out of the box. Give us a surprising new view.