My MLA Board answer
For my election materials for the MLA Board of Directors, I was asked to provide a 300-word answer to the following question:
If elected, what initiatives would you like to see MLA undertake during your term? Describe how your skills would help implement those initiatives.
Writing a cogent, worthwhile 300-word answer to that question was no easy task, and I’m not convinced I did a particularly good job of it. Moreover, I don’t care for the format where I answer a question without engaging in any kind of dialogue about it. So, at the risk of this becoming a “town hall meeting,” I am posting my complete answer here and opening the door to comments. Let me know what you think!
My career has been about information literacy education and employing new technologies to meet patrons’ needs. I moved to Tulsa two years ago to become library director at the University of Oklahoma – Tulsa and their newly-formed School of Community Medicine, whose philosophy is that it is impossible to treat patients independently of their community-where they live and work.
Tulsa, although a beautiful city in many ways, suffers from extreme health disparity. Once the home of more millionaires per capita than any other city in the United States, Tulsa is populated with kind, generous people who love their city and want to see it healthy, vibrant, and thriving. However, citizens who live in the older, impoverished North Tulsa area live an average of 14 years less than their neighbors five miles to the south, with only a six-lane interstate separating them. While the U.S. death rate is declining, Tulsa County’s rate is going up. Something must be done.
MLA has already begun to address health information literacy training and resources, for health providers and for communities. As stated in UNESCO’s Alexandria Proclamation, information literacy is a human right, and MLA has taken up that cause.
It shouldn’t stop there, however. Librarians are well situated to provide direct forms of intervention and support. We can develop social networks to link community health agencies. We can create new knowledge management platforms, using wikis and other web technologies, to allow public health workers to better document their work and publish their findings. We can organize new health literacy outreach strategies to better educate our communities. If elected, I will press the Board to develop a new task force specific to the objective of improving community health through social technologies and information outreach.
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Now playing: Aimee Mann – The Fall of the World’s Own Optimist
via FoxyTunes