HLABC and eHLbc have partnered to present a virtual paper panel featuring Glyneva Bradley-Ridout, Liaison and Education Librarian at Gerstein Science Information Center at the University of Toronto and Tyler Ostapyk, Librarian at the WRHA Virtual Library at the University of Manitoba.
Join us on February 26th from 1:00 – 2:00 pm PST. Please register for the Zoom link below: https://forms.gle/kJquQvMGwuHR6ZQP8
History of Glyneva’s work:
Glyneva recently completed a one-year sabbatical where she investigated the impacts of play on students, and their motivations for participating in play events, when visiting academic libraries. This research resulted in two publications on the topic of play in libraries, which Glyneva will shamelessly share during her presentation. This semester, Glyneva also developed and is teaching a course at the U of T iSchool called Developing Play based programming for adult users of libraries. Fun fact: Glyneva thought she wasn’t a pet person until she adopted her cat Bandit, and is now completely obsessed. Some pictures of Bandit will also shamelessly be shared during the presentation!
History of Tyler’s work:
I started developing the tool I am presenting [www.rxstring.ca] when I noticed the amount of time it was taking me to identify brand names and synonyms for drug interventions when developing literature search strategies. I knew many of the sources I was using to identify these terms had APIs that I could potentially leverage to automate the process. I began working on the tool in 2024 and first presented a prototype at the Linked Data 4 Production Conference in October 2024. I made the tool publicly available in March 2025 and presented it during a lightning talk at the CHLA conference in June 2025. Since then I have shared the tool with various groups and have incorporated feedback to further refine the tool and its features. As of today the tool has been accessed by 324 users and close to 1000 queries have been run by these users. Fun fact: I was a cataloguing librarian at Library and Archives Canada for five years before moving into health librarianship.
Special thanks again to eHLbc, the Electronic Health Library of BC, for making this event possible. We look forward to seeing everyone at this event!