Fall Highlights

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Fall 2026 edition of HLSP News. You can definitely feel Fall in the air now with lower temps, a hint of color in the leaves, and beautiful mums and asters in full bloom.

One of my favorite Fall glimmers is watching the leaves change color throughout the season and I follow the I Love NY Fall Foliage Report which opened last week. I'm planning to spend some time at a few of our State Parks to view the foliage this year. And I'm scheduling this year's field visits with all HLSP members now which will give me more opportunities to see our area's beautiful Fall foliage.

We have a resource that I've mentioned in the past and I'm going to highlight in this newsletter. It's called Niche Academy and we've created some content and highlighted content created by others including Niche. Details about this are set forth below.

October is MLA's National Medical Librarians Month. Please take this opportunity to share all that you do for your hospital with your providers and administrators.

The SCRLC Annual Meeting is also in October. This year marks our 60th Anniversary and it will be held at the Corning Museum of Glass. There will be several learning opportunities as well as a tour of the exhibit Tough Stuff: Women in the American Glass Studio and as always, it's a great opportunity to meet and network with librarians in our area. I hope you can join us on Tuesday, October 20 for this great meeting.

The 2026/2027 HLSP Grant Application forms will be distributed soon, and we're working on Lunch and Learn programs to bring you information about some exciting topics including an update on the popular tick program from a few years ago to be held on March 10 and information on AI in medicine and health care.

Please reach out with any questions and glimmers you might have or any services SCRLC provides to you as well as for health information to our entire membership. I hope you find ways to enjoy the Fall.

All the Best,

Christine Brown

Outreach Services Librarian/HLSP Coordinator

Niche Academy

We have a subscription to Niche Academy which is a learning platform for libraries. Niche is open to all member libraries including HLSP members to create content. If you have a need for developing learning opportunities for any of your providers or administrators, a Niche Academy tutorial might be a way to do so. There is a lot of topics are covered through Niche Market, and you can also create your own content.

SCRLC has created content on our Niche Academy with several specifically for the HLSP program. The 4 tutorials that are specific to the HLSP are here.

• HLSP Program - This one provides an overview of our HLSP program.

• Electronic Resources - This one outlines all the electronic resources we provide including the NEJM and STAT!Ref subscription for all members and the Ovid cost share program

• Lunch and Learn - This one has all the recorded lunch and learn webinars that you can access in one place rather than scroll through our YouTube page

• HLSP Grant Program - This one describes the grant program

I'm working on two more HLSP focused tutorials; one on Health Disparities and another on the Anatomy of a Library series that has been included in a few editions of our HLSP News.

If you have any interest in creating your own content, please let me know and we can get you set up to do that.

October is

National Medical Librarians Month

The Medical Library Association (MLA) established October as National Medical Librarians Month (NMLM) in 1997, and it has been celebrated in October every year since then.

The NMLM theme for 2026 is "Medical Librarians: Trusted Expertise in Times of Change" and there is a new poster available on the MLA website. The poster encourages people to connect with a medical librarian and it would be good to post in a common area at your hospital.

The MLA webpage for NMLM also includes info and material from 2025 that is still relevant this year.

Some ways to celebrate NMLM include: 

• Display a poster about NMLM and include your contact information.
• Update your email signature to include an NMLM Banner
• Write impact stories about your contributions to your community and share with your hospital in the newsletter or other communication methods. 
• Host an event such as a lunch and learn, a trivia contest, or a pop-up booth at an internal event where your providers and administrators can meet their health information professionals and learn about the services you provide.

Please feel free to use any of these ideas or develop your own idea for celebrating all that you provide your hospital during the month of October and throughout the year. And please share them with me so she can share them with the SCRLC community.

Field Visits

The 2026/2027 Field Visits are mostly scheduled for this Fall and if I haven't been in touch with you already, I will be in touch with you soon to schedule our visit. I always look forward to these visits and prefer meeting in person as it's a great opportunity to have a discussion about your library and information needs in a non-screen environment.

During our visit, I plan to review your membership benefits, discuss how we can meet any library and information needs you and your providers and administrators may have and learn about challenges you are facing.

Please feel free to ask me any questions you might have and discuss anything you want about your hospital and how we at SCRLC can help you meet the library and information needs of your hospital.

HLSP Grant Program

There are two key things to remember about the HLSP Grant Program.

First, grant funds must be entirely spent during the 2026/2027 fiscal year (7/1/26 to 6/30/27). Extensions cannot and will not be granted.

Second, the deadline for filing the application will be enforced this year. If the application isn't received by the deadline, then the funds will not be sent to that hospital.

All HLSP Members will be receiving their 2026/2027 HLSP Grant application soon. Please notice that there is a deadline for filing the application. This year we will hold firm on the deadline to file the application. If an HLSP member doesn't submit its completed grant application by the deadline date, it will not receive the grant funds allocated to it this year and the funds that have been allocated for it will be directed toward other HLSP services.

If you have any questions about any aspect of the HLSP Grant Program including whether a specific item or service is allowable, you can check the guidelines or reach out to me for information and a discussion. You can also view the Niche Academy tutorial on the grant program.

As a reminder, we subscribed to the 2025 edition of Doody's Core Titles and we continue to have access to this resource for the 2026/2027 fiscal year. We held a demonstration webinar of the resource in May which was recorded and is now available on our website. Doody's is great resource for deciding which books to purchase to expand your collection.

Continuing Education

Upcoming Webinars

Currently, there are no programs scheduled for SCRLC's Health, Wellness, and Hospital Libraries Lunch and Learn series during the Fall season. We will notify everyone when the next Lunch and Learn program is scheduled.

The Long Island Library Resources Council (LILRC) has scheduled a webinar about a consumer health information libguide developed by the Northwell Librarians on January 22, titled "Improving Health Literacy Access Through Partnership with Local Medical Librarians" that you can attend as a member of SCRLC.

The Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) is offering the following FREE CE classes this Fall:

Advancing Accessible Health Information for Deaf, DeafBlind, and Hard of Hearing (DDBHH) Communities - Tuesday October 6, 2:00 to 3:00

Rural Health Resources - Thursday, November 19, 1:00 to 2:00

Keep in mind that if the day/time for the program doesn't fit your schedule, you can usually register and receive a link to the recording after the program unless it isn't recorded.

The Medical Library Association (MLA) is offering the following CE class this Fall:

Grant Writing for Librarians - Thursday, October 29, 2:00 to 3:30

Medical Terminology Fundamentals for Health Sciences Librarians - Tuesday, December 15, 2:00 to 3:30

Understanding Your Institution: Aligning Library Services with Mission, Accreditation, and Patron Needs - Wednesday, November 18, 2:00 to 3:30

SCRLC covered the cost to attend an MLA webinar offered in February titled "Micro Changes that Matter: Strategic Responses for Shifting Medical Library Environments" and we still have "seats" available for any HLSP member. If you are interested, please reach out to me and I can provide you a link to the recording.

For a complete listing of MLA CE classes, check out their website. Please note that there is a charge for most MLA CE classes with a discounted price for members. SCRLC may be able to pay for your registration for MLA programs so keep that option in mind for these or any other courses on the MLA website. And if you find an MLA class that you are interested in, please let me know and I will look into whether SCRLC can pay for it for you.

Recorded Webinars:

SCRLC's Lunch & Learn Series:

• Lunch and Learn: AI in Medicine
• Lunch and Learn: Libraries as Key Players in Publishing
• Lunch and Learn: Medical Librarians Supporting Pharmacists
• "It's an Art, Not a Science:" How to Build a Practice of Slow Librarianship
• Mosquito-borne Infections in New York State

We still have seats available for an NLM webinar on Trauma-Informed Librarianship. Let me know if you would like to access to this webinar at no charge.

NNLM held a webinar on DOCLINE and FREESHARE in August 2024 and it was recorded.

MedlinePlus Tutorial for Librarians & Health Educators - self-paced. This interactive, narrated tutorial provides a tour of the MedlinePlus website and explains why MedlinePlus is a trusted reference when answering health information questions.

This tutorial takes about 1 hour to complete. (1 CE credit)

Recordings of past webinars can be found here.