The Australasian Evidence Based Practice Librarians’ Institute is entering an exciting new chapter in 2026, marked by fresh leadership, an innovative learning model, and a vibrant updated identity. Reflecting the Institute’s growing reach and engagement across the Asia/Pacific region, AEBPLI has formally transitioned from the Australian Evidence Based Practice Librarians’ Institute to the Australasian Evidence Based Practice Librarians’ Institute, recognising the strong participation and collaboration from colleagues across Australasia.
In response to evolving learning needs, AEBPLI is transitioning to a fully online delivery model in 2026. The program incorporates both synchronous and asynchronous components, providing flexibility for participants to engage with content at their own pace while still benefiting from live sessions, collaborative discussions, and real-time support from tutors and peers. This approach has been carefully designed to maintain the interactive, supportive environment that AEBPLI is known for, while expanding access across Australasia.
AEBPLI 2026 is designed for a broad range of participants, from those who are new to evidence-based practice through to experienced librarians looking to refresh or strengthen their skills. The Institute is ideal for health librarians wanting to build confidence in evidence-based practice concepts, searching, critical appraisal, and teaching, as well as those seeking a contemporary update on current approaches and best practice. The new online format also creates opportunities for people who may previously have been unable to attend due to travel costs, time away from their workplace, or other commitments, making AEBPLI more accessible than ever before.
At the same time, AEBPLI has a refreshed look and feel. This updated identity reflects a modern, engaging aesthetic while preserving the Institute’s core spirit—its sense of community, collaboration, and commitment to excellence in evidence-based practice. The result is a contemporary learning experience that remains true to what participants have always valued about AEBPLI.
We are delighted to introduce our new Convenor team, led by Co-Convenors Nikki May (SA Health Library Service) and Janene Batten (Yale University), supported by Kathryn Ritchie (Central Queensland Hospital and Health Service), Rosie Glynn (Queensland University of Technology), and Tony Courtenay (Cairns and Hinterland Hospital and Health Service). Bringing a wealth of experience and a shared passion for evidence-based practice, this team is committed to building on AEBPLI’s strong foundations while guiding the Institute into its next phase.
Working alongside them is an exceptional team of tutors, Blair Kelly (Deakin University), Mina Nichols-Boyd (Austin Health), Kathryn Rough (Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine/Australia and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists), Jeph Ko (Flinders University), Mario Sos (Monash University), and Dawn Carlisle (University of Auckland), who are central to the AEBPLI experience. Their expertise, enthusiasm, and commitment to participant learning ensure that the Institute continues to deliver high-quality, practical, and engaging education.
✍️ Register
Expressions of Interest (EOI) for AEBPLI 2026 are now open and will close on 30 June 2026. Registration offers will be sent to the first 24 participants on the EOI list. Successful applicants will have six weeks to complete their registration and submit payment. Any remaining places will then be offered to those on the waiting list, with all remaining waitlisted participants receiving first offer for the 2027 Institute.
🕒 Time
The Institute will be held every Thursday from the week commencing 19 October through to the week ending 23 November 2026.
Sessions will commence at 12:00 pm AEST, 9:00 am WA time, and 2:00 pm NZ time, with each session running for 3 hours for each session, with approx. 2 hours prep time for each session”.
💸 Cost
Registration costs are:
ALIA Members: AUD $500
Non-ALIA Members: AUD $650 (yet another reason – along with 13 others – to consider HLA Membership)
AEBPLI 2026 represents an exciting evolution—honouring its legacy while embracing new opportunities to connect, learn, and grow. We look forward to welcoming participants to this next chapter.
❓Questions
If you have any questions or would like further information on the institute, please don’t hesitate in emailing us at aebpli.convenor@gmail.com
Health Libraries Inc (HLi)/Health Libraries Australia (HLA) invites submissions for its upcoming conference exploring the theme:
“The fire within: passion and purpose in health libraries”
Health libraries are powered by passion – for evidence, learning, innovation, collaboration and advocacy. In an environment of rapid change and increasing demand, health librarians continue to adapt, lead and demonstrate their value across clinical care, research, education and organisational decision-making
This conference will showcase how health libraries ignite change, sustain momentum and align purpose with impact. We invite contributions that share practice-based insights, innovations, lesson learned and future-focused ideas that reflect the vital role of health libraries today and into the future.
The program will comprise invited keynotes, 20-minute presentations, 10-minute lightning talks, 1.5-hour workshops and poster presentations, aligned to the sub-themes below.
Sub-themes
a. Igniting Knowledge & Fuel for Evidence: Evolving health librarian roles
This sub-theme explores how health librarians generate, manage and apply knowledge and evidence to support informed decision making across health organisations. It highlights the evolving roles of librarians as trusted partners in clinical care, research support, education and organisational practice.
b. Sparks of Innovation & Fanning the Flames: Advocacy and demonstrating value in health libraries
This sub-theme focuses on how health libraries innovate, adopt new technologies and advocate for their value in a rapidly changing information environment. It brings together digital transformation and impact storytelling, emphasising meaningful, ethical and sustainable change.
c. Community Fire and Lighting the Path: Partnerships, education and health literacy
This sub-theme highlights the relational and collaborative nature of health librarianship. It focuses on partnerships that matter, and on teaching and learning initiatives that build capability, confidence and health information literacy among staff, students, researchers, consumers and communities.
Presentation types
A. Full presentation: 20- minutes
We invite abstracts of 200-350 words for 20-minute presentations addressing one or more conference sub-themes. Presentations should focus on applied practice, evaluation, service innovation or research relevant to health library and information services.
B. Lightning Talks: 10-minutes
Lightning talks provide a fast-paced opportunity to share a single idea, initiative or insight. Lightning talks will be 10 minutes in length and may incorporate a small number of slides (5-12 at the most). Abstracts should be 150-200 words and may address one or more of the conference themes.
Call for Workshop proposals
Workshops: 1.5 hour (90 mins)
Workshops should be interactive and skills-focused, providing participants with practical tools, techniques or approaches aligned to the conference sub-themes.
Details of any previous delivery of the workshop (if applicable)
Call for Poster Presentations
Poster presentations provide an opportunity to showcase projects, ideas and work-in-progress in a visual and conversational format. Posters are particularly suited to emerging initiatives, exploratory work and practice-based projects.
We invite poster abstracts aligned with one or more of the conference sub-themes. Poster abstracts should be 150-200 words and may address one or more of the conference themes.
Posters will be displayed throughout the conference, with dedicated viewing times included in the program.
Submission processes and Review
Abstracts and workshop proposals will be peer-reviewed by the conference committee.
Dr Ranjana Srivastava is an oncologist, Fulbright scholar, and award-winning writer. She is a long-time columnist for The Guardian newspaper where she writes on the intersection of medicine and humanity. Ranjana practices in the Victorian public hospital system and specialises in geriatric oncology, the care of older patients with cancer. She also has a deep interest in the welfare of multicultural and disadvantaged communities.
Ranjana’s two Fulbright awards allowed her to obtain a fellowship in medical ethics at the University of Chicago and a Master in Public Administration at Harvard University.
Among her many awards, Ranjana is the recipient of a Human Rights Literature Prize for her book, Dying for a Chat. She recently won the Kennedy Award for Outstanding Columnist for her writing on compassion in medicine. Her TEDx Talk The Art of Medicine is a thoughtful reflection on the importance of honesty in medicine. Her commitment to ethical medicine saw her receive a Medal of the Order of Australia for her contribution to doctor-patient communication.
“ChatGPT 5.0 … approaching but not matching human performance.”
” AI can substantially reduce the time and labor required”
🐘 Left hand truncation (from the expert searching listserv – mainly added so could use the elephant icon for truncation)
“left-hand truncation is possible in Cochrane Wiley, which can be quite helpful. For example, *glyc*mi* returns multiple spellings, including hypoglycaemia, hyperglycemic, glycaemic, etc”
“MEDLINE through Web of Science makes left truncation possible: *therap* in title: 1,514,613 hits; therap* in title: 1,111,039” “While we cannot left-truncate in Ovid, we can mid-truncate.C*fentan*.ti. for example retrieves cyclopropylfentanyl along with carfentanil, carfentanyl, etc.”
“laptop $500..$800 returns results mentioning prices in that range. The same syntax works for years (civil rights legislation 1964..1968) or any other measurement”
“other agents such Claude Health and Wellness AI are gaining patient traction so fast that the NHS is in a dilemma about how it will manage its comprehensive information triage service – an equivalent idea to 1800Medicare which has been around more than a decade.”
“Wolters Kluwer Health today announced a collaboration with Microsoft that integrates UpToDate®, a leading clinical decision support (CDS) solution, with Microsoft Dragon Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Microsoft Teams”
“But no Australian health institution dealing at scale with patients will be able to ignore what Amazon has now shown the new AI agents can do at scale in the UC San Diego Health experiment: EMR linked agentic patient verification, appointment management, patient insights, ambient documentation, and medical coding, all in real time. The UC San Diego Health project, if nothing else, has proven that in days, not months of integration work at a big provider, an AI engagement agent can give patients faster access to care, clinicians more time for care, and release a conga line of related patient facing staff to do other important work.”
An oldie but a goodie. Easy one for health librarians …
A boy is in a terrible car accident. His father is killed at the scene. The boy is rushed to hospital and taken to the operating theatre. The surgeon walks in, looks at him, and says: “I can’t operate on him — he’s my son”?
Changing minds and methods: providing health sciences faculty with alternatives to systematic reviews assignments
Which Systematic Review Software Works Best? A Practical Comparison
good comparison table
bims: Biomed News (other listservs of possible interest to health librarians available on the Elist section of HLA)
how you can create your own alert if you are particularly interested in a topic, and then others can follow it etc
OpenEvidence
Google Vids – New (Sep 2025) / free (10 min length limit), cloud based, seems pretty easy to use / can provide text & a pretty good AI voice will provide the voiceovers / introductory video
“Prism (free) brings together drafting, editing, citation management, equations, and collaboration in a single, cloud-based environment. Built with native LaTeX support, the platform removes the need for complex local setups while enabling researchers to focus on their work rather than tooling”
” … just a few of the tasks assigned to people on RentAHuman.ai — a platform that allows people to advertise their time and talent to artificial-intelligence agents”
Keyboard shortcuts for Outlook (web version) – in case of use to anyone else who prefers the web version of Outlook (may work in the program also – not sure)
(note – this is with Gmail keyboard shortcuts activated via settings (cog icon top right) > General > Accessibility > Keyboard Shortcuts > select Gmail)
Close email – U (takes you back to list view)
Delete email – Shft 3 (ie #)
Expand (conversation) – ;
Folders (move focus to) – Ctrl Y
Forward email – F
Go to Drafts – G D
Go to Inbox – G I
Go to Sent – G T
Junk – Shft 1 (send message to junk)
Keyboard shortcuts – ?
Label – L
Left panel (hide) – Alt F1
Letter navigation – Alt > letter
Mark read – Shift I
Mark unread – Shift U
Move email to folder – V
New email – C
New Window – Shft Enter (new window. Win up arrow for full screen. Useful to see full chain)
Next email in list – J
Open first email – EnterPin – right click and select
Previous email in list – K
Reply – R
Reply all – A
Search – /
Select – X
Send – Ctrl Enter
Snooze – B (set it to reappear)
Search:
category: e.g. category:tickets (via Label as above)
subject: e.g. subject:iron
from: e.g from:juliet
Boolean: e.g. AND OR NOT (e.g. received:12/03/2024 AND subject:ticket)
attachments: e.g. hasattachment:yes attachments:*.docx
received: e.g. received:today “this week” “this month” “this year” 12/03/2024
to: e.g. to:juliet
Many of you may have heard that Cheryl Hamill is exiting stage left (today actually) after many years being a leading light in health librarianship.
Read the poem written for her – by a librarian with clearly too little work to do – and discover her most ardent parting wish …
“One in four animals on the planet earth is a beetle. Think of your three closest friends – if none of them are beetles, statistically speaking you are probably a beetle” 🪲
New issues of JEAHIL, JCHLA (reviews of Lens, DynaMed, OpenAlex etc)
“We recently introduced otto-SR (Otto Science Institute), a generative AI system for automated screening and data extraction that incorporates advanced prompting strategies and agentic LLM workflows. Data from currently unpublished studies involving benchmarking against dual human reviewers suggest that otto-SR achieved superior performance in both screening (otto-SR: 96.7% sensitivity, 97.9% specificity; human: 81.7% sensitivity, 98.1% specificity) and data extraction (otto-SR: 93.1% accuracy; human: 79.7% accuracy) tasks. Most notably, otto-SR reproduced and updated an entire issue of the Cochrane library (12 SRs) in under 2 days*, highlighting the potential for automation to accelerate evidence synthesis and to provide decisionmakers with timely information. Across these 12 SRs, otto-SR included nearly twice as many eligible studies as the original Cochrane authors (114 versus 64 studies)”
* “Using otto-SR, we reproduced and updated an entire issue of Cochrane reviews (n=12) in two days, representing approximately 12 work-years of traditional systematic review work“. From the preprint describing Otto
“More recently, the concept of agentic RAG has gained traction, promising more sophisticated “deep research” capabilities. Systems developed by industry leaders such as OpenAI [16], Perplexity AI [17], and Google [18] have demonstrated the ability to decompose complex questions, perform iterative searches, and synthesize more comprehensive reports. Yet, these general-purpose agentic systems are not specifically tailored for the biomedical domain … to bridge this gap, we introduce Queryome, a multi-agent deep research system designed specifically for end-to-end biomedical literature analysis. Queryome orchestrates a hierarchy of collaborating AI agents that perform iterative, multi-faceted searches against a curated, comprehensive search engine covering the entirety of PubMed [1]. Crucially, the system is engineered to reason over abstract text of every retrieved article, ensuring that its final synthesis is deeply grounded in the available evidence”
Instats videos – quite a few are free (using Filters (top right) > Sort by > Free. Many are quite technical but there are a number on research, using statistical tools (R, Python etc). An upcoming one is AI Tools for Research 2.0 (requires free registration, can be watched later)
Previously mentioned the many useful ebooks available via Open Educational Resources (OER) but difficulty in keeping track on new ebooks available. You can sign up to receive updates here
Spotted in the Fin Review re terrible corporate jargon – being “Promoted Outwards” is “not about job cuts but giving employees the opportunity to embrace new challenges outside the organisation”
Firmly in the “work smarter, not harder” camp – a library’s change from EZProxy to Open Athens resulted in a huge number of dead links. They were fixing these manually one by one, over two years until …. (article title gives it away)
