37th Annual Conference (March 2004)
Global Information Dissemination & Management: Focus on Health
Sheraton Boston Hotel
Boston, Massachusetts
March 29 – 31, 2004
| Monday, March 29, 2004 | |
|---|---|
| 2 – 3:30 PM | Tour of the Special Exhibits of the Warren Museum Exhibit Gallery and the Warren Anatomical Museum at the Countway Medical Library , at Harvard University.
Guides: Virginia A. Hunt, Curatorial Assistant for Museum and Archives Collections and Jack Eckert, Reference Librarian |
| 4 – 6 PM | Board Meeting |
| Tuesday, March 30, 2004 | |
| 8:30 AM | Registration, Continental Breakfast |
| 9:15 – 10:45 AM | International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP)
Speaker: Neil Pakenham-Walsh, Senior Programme Manager, INASP-Health |
| 10:45 – 11 AM | Break |
| 11 – 12 PM | The Cochrane Collaboration, the U.S. Cochrane Center and the Cochrane Library
Speaker: Kay Dickersin, Ph.D., Director, U.S. Cochrane Center, and |
| 12 – 2 PM | Lunch |
| 2 – 3 PM | The Global Burden of Disease
Speaker: Stephen T. McGarvey, PhD, MPH Director of the International Health Institute and Professor of Community Health, Brown University School of Medicine |
| 3 – 3:15 PM | Break |
| 3:15 – 4:15 PM | Africana Information Resources
Speaker: Gretchen Walsh, Head, African Studies Library, Boston University |
| 7 PM | Banquet at Durgin Park, 340 Faneuil Hall Market Place |
| Wednesday, March 31, 2004 | |
| 9 AM | Continental Breakfast |
| 9:30 – 11 AM | APLIC-I Business Meeting and 2005 Annual Meeting planning |
| 11 AM -12:30 PM | Perspectives on the WSIS (World Summit on the Information Society)
Moderator: Susan Pasquariella, Senior Knowledge Sharing Officer, UNFPA and Manager, Development Gateway Population and Reproductive Health Portal Panelists: Kate Wild; and Nancy Hafkin |
| 12:30 – 2 PM | Lunch |
| 2 – 3 PM | Accessible Information on Development Activities (AiDA)
Speaker: Virginia Yee, World Bank |
| 3 – 3:15 PM | Break |
| 3:15 – 4:30 PM | Shifting Sands and Building Bridges – Perspectives on Organizational Change Moderator: Laurian Carroll, Manager, Information Services, Management Sciences for Health
|
Accomodations:
Sheraton Room Reservation Form (PAAs Meeting page)
Bed & Breakfast Accomodations in Boston
Boston – General Information:
BostonUSA.com – Official Site of the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau
Boston.com for news, weather, arts, entertainment and more
Speaker bios
Research Interests:
Major research interests are related to randomized clinical trials, trials registers, meta analysis, publication bias, women’s health and the development and utilization of methods for the evaluation of medical care and its effectiveness.
Dr. Dickersin is the Director for The Center for Clinical Trials and Evidence-based Healthcare – http://bms.brown.edu/ct at Brown University. She is Co Director of the United States (U.S.) Cochrane Center – http://www.cochrane.us, one of 13 Centers worldwide participating in The Cochrane Collaboration. The Collaboration aims to help people make well informed decisions about health by preparing, maintaining, and promoting the accessibility of systematic reviews of available evidence on the benefits and risks of health care. The Cochrane Collaboration publishes a register of controlled clinical trials and other studies (“CENTRAL”), which is coordinated through the U.S. Cochrane Center. Funding for the CENTRAL development work is through The National Library of Medicine.
Dr. Dickersin also serves as an editor of the Eyes and Vision Review Group. In this regard, she oversees efforts in the United States to coordinate and contribute to the Cochrane Eyes and Vision Review Group (CEVG) – http://www.cochraneeyes.org/. CEVG is responsible for synthesizing the world’s best evidence on healthcare interventions related to eye health. The US effort to contribute to CEVG’s work is funded by the National Eye Institute.
Dr. Dickersin directs the coordinating center for two federally funded, multicenter randomized trials. The Ischemic Optic Neuropathy Decompression Trial (IONDT) determined the relative efficacy of optic nerve decompression surgery with careful followup compared to careful followup alone (standard care) in patients with non-arteritic ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION). The IONDT is a single-masked, multicenter randomized trial, involving 25 clinical centers and a central Coordinating Center. At 24 months of followup there was no beneficial effect of surgery. The IONDT Research Group has continued following these patients to evaluate longer term outcomes. IONDT is funded by The National Eye Institute. The Surgical Treatments Outcomes Project for Dysfunctional Uterine Bleeding (STOP-DUB) – http://www.stop-dub.org/ is a reandomized trial which has as its overall objective comparison of the effectiveness of hysterectomy versus endometrial ablation in women with dysfunctional uterine bleeding (DUB)(STOP-DUB.org). Thirty-three Clinical Centers in the US and Canada have enrolled women in STOP-DUB. Effectiveness of the two surgeries will be compared at one year and subsequent years of followup. Women are being followed for a minimum of 2 years. STOP-DUB is funded by The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Dr. Dickersin oversees a pilot project, TrialsCentral.org – http://www.trialscentral.org/, which aims to provide in one place available information about U.S.-based ongoing clinical trials.
Dr. Nancy J. Hafkin has been working to promote the development of information and communications in Africa over the course of more than twenty-five years.
Nancy Hafkin spearheaded the Pan African Development Information System (PADIS) of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) from 1987 until 1997. She then served as Team Leader for Promoting of Information Technology for Development, of the Development Information Services Division of ECA (UN) from 1997 until 2000, where she was Coordinator of the African Information Society Initiative (AISI), the African governments’ mandate to use ICTs to accelerate socio-economic development in Africa. Nancy also served as a facilitator in establishing the Partnership for Information and Communication Technologies in Africa (PICTA), a coordinating body of donor and executing agency partners in support of the AISI. She headed a number of early efforts at electronic connectivity in Africa, particularly through the Capacity Building for Electronic Communication in Africa project, 1993-1996 (CABECA) and the organization of major conferences including the Regional Symposium on Telematics (1995), Global Connectivity for Africa (1998) and the first African Development Forum: Challenges to African of Globalization and the Information Age (1999). In 2000 the Association for Progressive established an annual Nancy Hafkin Communications Prize competition.
Nancy Hafkin has a long history of work on gender and development issues. From 1976-1987 she worked as Chief of Research and Publications at the African Training and Research Centre for Women of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia). In 2001 she co-authored Gender, Information and Developing Countries, commissioned by USAID. Nancy is now working as a consultant on information technology for development. She has a Ph.D. in African history from Boston University.
Stephen McGarvey is the Director of the International Health Institute and Associate Professor of Community Health. McGarvey earned a B.A. in Sociology from Villanova University, a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Pennsylvania State University in 1980, and an M.P.H. in Epidemiology from Yale University. McGarvey is concerned with issues of human population biology and international health, specifically modernization-related induced socio-economic and behavioral changes, tropical parasitology and child nutritional status and health, and environmental issues. His research involves developing-world countries such as Samoa, the Philippines, and China.
Neil Pakenham-Walsh has a background in medicine and medical publishing, including work with the World Health Organization, the journal Medicine Digest, and the CD-ROM series Topics in International Health (Wellcome Trust). He has worked as a medical officer in rural Ecuador and Peru. He currently runs the INASP-Health programme (International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications), which aims to support cooperation, analysis, and advocacy among those working to improve access to reliable information for healthcare workers in developing and transitional countries.
Susan Kingsley Pasquariella is Senior Knowledge Sharing Officer in the Knowledge Sharing Branch of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). From 1993 to 2001, Dr. Pasquariella was Global Coordinator of the United Nations Population Information Network (POPIN). Prior to 1993, she served as Head Librarian of Columbia University’s Center for Population and Family Health (CPFH). She has written extensively on population information availability, accessibility and dissemination in an electronic context. She holds Doctoral and Master’s degrees in Library and Information Science from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biology from Skidmore College.
Gretchen Walsh is the Head of the African Studies Library in the Mugar Memorial Library at Boston University. Ms. Walsh received her Masters in Library Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1974, and received a certificate in African Studies, while concentrating in Anthropology. Gretchen has held a number of library positions that have combined her interests in African Studies and Librarianship. Over the course of Ms. Walsh’s career she has published in journals, newsletters, and contributed chapters to books on librarianship and African studies, and has written reviews in Choice, African Book Publishing Record, and the International Journal of African Historical Studies. Forthcoming publications include:
Research, Reference Service, and Resources for the Study of Africa, edited by Deborah LaFond and Gretchen Walsh. Forthcoming, Summer 2004, Haworth Press. (also as a special issue of Reference Librarian). Contains: Walsh, Gretchen. “Can We Get There from Here?”: Negotiating the Washouts, Cave-ins, Dead Ends, and Other Hazards on the Road to Research on Africa.
“Library Instruction and Reference for Undergraduate Research on Africa: Opening a Faculty/Library Partnership” Forthcoming in memorial volume for Daniel Britz, to be published by Scarecrow Press.
Kate Wild has more than thirty years of experience in the broad area of information and development. She joined IDRC in 1970 as one of the early members of its ground-breaking information sciences division. Her work then focused mainly on bibliographic information systems and their role in building resources for decision-making in developing countries. In 1979 she joined the International Labour Office where she was responsible for leading the development of the International Labour Information System and eventually for managing the ILO’s computer systems, statistics and library and documentation activities. Kate rejoined IDRC in 1995 in its Regional Office for Southern Africa in Johannesburg. There she was IDRC’s representative on the National Telecommunications Policy Project and was instrumental in the initial design of IDRC’s Acacia program in support of the use of ICTs for community empowerment in Africa. She has also been associated with the UN Economic Commission for Africa as coordinator of its inaugural African Development Forum on the challenge to Africa of globalisation and the information society and with the Mozambique Acacia Advisory Committee as it defined the basic elements of a national ICT policy for the country.
She is now an independent consultant based in Toronto working on a variety of international projects in the area of information and communication for development.
Virginia Yee is a Senior Information Officer at the World Bank, currently serving as the team coordinator for the Accessible Information on Development Activities (AiDA) initiative of the Development Gateway portal. She has over fifteen years of experience managing content and technology components of
information and knowledge management activities at the World Bank and American Public Health Association. She has also worked aa a nutritionist in the Ministry of Health Fiji.