BESTT Presenters

Presenters

Michele Beaulieu ~ Robert Hall ~ Tom Mead ~ Connie Schardt ~ Ed Sperr ~ Mary Edgerly

D. Michele Beaulieu, RN, BSN, is the Western Maryland Area Health Education Center’s Coordinator of Health Information. She has extensive experience in training health information professionals, information specialists, and health professionals to acces health science information. She is currently Project Coordinator for B.E.S.T.T. She has also played key roles in a number of other grant-funded health information initiatives and has served as a panel presenter at the National Conference on Service Learning sponsored by the Health Profession Schools in Service to the National program. Michele earned her Barchelor in Science in Nursing from the University of Maryland School of Nursing and has worked in information services at Western Maryland Area Health Education Center for ten years. Michele can be reached at mbeaulieu@allconet.org.

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Robert Hall, BA, is the Systems Librarian for Allegany County Library System. He is a founding member of ALLCONET, a wireless-based network in partnership with SAILOR, Maryland’s public access network. He designed and implemented the Internet-based network for the library system’s six branches, bringing shared resources to the entire county, including the circulation system anda wealth of Interet and database resources. As the library’s technical representative on ALLCONET, he has helped implement a countywide solution that is a model for any small county. ALLCONET’s primary role is to administer a county information infrastructure and coordinate its activity. In the State of Maryland, it has the unique distinction of being the oldest network that is shared between county and city governments, the board of education, and the library system.

Prior to serving in Allegany County, Robert worked at a small liberal arts college in Baltimore as a Systems/Acquisitions Librarian. At Villa Julie College, he ran library services including acquisitions and processing. Over a six-year period, he worked on developing a campus-wide network that carried the library resources to every campus desktop. During that time, he also taught legal database research for the paralegal department. Robert was also a legal reference librarian at three very different types of law libraries. He has worked at the Maryland State Law Library, Baltimore County Law Library, as well as in a private DC law firm in Georgetown. Robert’s degrees are in American Studies--an AA from Anne Arundel Community College and a BA from University of Maryland Baltimore County. He has also completed 24 hours at College Park’s MLS program.

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Thomas Mead, BA, MLS, is a Reference Librarian at the Biomedical Libraries of Dartmouth College, where he is a Library Liaison to two large departments with interests in rural health, Dartmouth’s Department of Community and Family Medicine, and the Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences. Tom will demonstrate some fun approaches to introducing and promoting both our new and our time-honored library services. His session will be deliberately fast-moving, a PowerPoint based “sampler” of orientations, workshops, and library “Grand Rounds” presented to students and healthcare professionals associated with Dartmouth College, the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, and affiliated practitioners in the rural environs of New Hampshire and Maine.

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Connie Schardt, MLS, AHIP, is the Education Coordinator for the Medical Center Library at Duke University. In this position, she is responsible for planning and developing educational opportunities that support the resources and services of the Library. She became interested in Evidence-Based Medicine when asked by the medical school faculty to help teach question building and search strategies as part of the newly designed EBM curriculum for residents. This provided an opportunity for Connie to work with the Program Director for residency training to establish a Library component to Morning Report. Once a week the Library is now involved in Morning Reports for General Internal Medicine and Pediatrics. Connie is a co-instructor for the Distance Education course “EBM and the Medical Librarian” which started as a MLA CE course and is now being offered through the Library School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition to these teaching roles, Connie has helped create web tutorials and special projects that deliver instruction to students at the “point-of-need.” Two of the library’s most popular tutorials are Introduction to EBM and the Ovid Tutorial. Connie is active within the Medical Library Association and has made numerous presentations around the region on the topics of standards for hospital libraries and Evidence-Based Medicine. She received her BA in Art History from the University of California at Berkeley and a MLS from San Jose State University. She is a distinguished member of the Academy of Health Information Professionals (AHIP).

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Edwin Sperr, MLIS, is the Systems Librarian at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine Library. He is responsible for the maintenance of the library’s computer systems and administers its OVID MEDLINE system. He also provides OVID training at the library. Previously, he was the Assistant Technical Services/Reference Librarian at Columbia College in South Carolina, and an Archival Assistant for the Office of James Dickey. Ed earned his BA in English at the University of Georgia and his MLIS at the University of South Carolina.

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Mary Spalding Edgerly, MA, MLIS, BESTT Project Director, was the Coordinator of Information Management at Western Maryland Area Health Education Center (WMAHEC) at the time of the conference. (She is now a reference librarian at Frostburg State University and a consultant to WMAHEC.) She has served in key roles on other grant-funded projects at WMAHEC. She is the President of the Maryland Association of Health Sciences Librarians and a member of the Medical Library Association. Mary has taught computer courses for adult learners at Allegany College of Maryland and currently teaches English courses at Frostburg State University. Mary received a BA in English from Frostburg State University, an MA in English from West Virginia University, and an MLIS from South Carolina University. Mary can be reached at medgerly@frostburg.edu.