Justin F. Gaynor, Ph.D. MLIS Candidate / Medical Librarianship

Palliative care is a medical specialty focused on relieving pain and suffering rather than solving the underlying disease or injury. While often associated with people near the end of their lives, it is equally merciful in the case of children with cancer, for example.

In 2018, the California state legislature mandated that access to palliative care be made available to all Medi-Cal patients. While a laudable step, the state lacks enough trained nurses, and particularly bilingual nurses, to meet the need. (45% of Californians speak a language other than English at home.)

Working with the Shiley Haynes Institute (SHI), which supports all 23 campuses of the California State University (CSU) system, I launched a project designed to help nursing students throughout the state understand palliative care as a career option. This will be accomplished with a 'Palliative Care Day' event, hosted by SHI, in which students can attend videoconferences to learn more. I have recruited health science librarians throughout the CSU system to help publicize the event to their students.

In addition to the Palliative Care Day event in October 2025, two librarians and I will host a panel discussion at SHI's Annual Symposium in June 2025. This event brings together front-line practitioners and social workers as well as medical researchers, insurers and infrastructure providers from around the world. This is an ideal opportunity for people in the palliative care world to learn about the benefits they can obtain from working with their local health science librarians, wherever they are.

In 2023-2024, the sixteen universities that are taking part in this project collectively awarded over 2000 nursing degrees to students who identified as Asian, Hispanic or international. Many of these students are multilingual. The CSU system is therefore a valuable ally in helping the state reach its goals for palliative care.

In my Programming role in the Student Chapter of SLA, I arranged a talk with a former director of Chicago's Field Museum library with our group (scheduled for Fall 2025). This is one of the premier learning museums in the country.

Another talk I arranged for my fellow MLIS students is with a Supervisory Archivist at the Obama Presidential Library, still under construction. This will be the first all-digital Presidential Library. This is part of the National Archives and not to be confused with the privately-funded Obama Center in Chicago. This talk is also scheduled for Fall 2025.

I am also building bridges as part of my role as President-Elect of the Engineering Community. As part of our monthly speaker series, I arranged a lecture by the Head of Collections at the historical Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek in Weimar, Germany. I became interested in Anna Amalia after writing a paper about it for one of my classes.

This library caught fire in 2004 and thousands of priceless historical documents were damaged by fire, smoke and/or water. The Klassik Stiftung Weimar has been developing new restoration techniques to restore as many of these damaged documents as possible.

This will be our first monthly seminar featuring a speaker from Europe. The technology around restoration of the damaged book is of particular interest.

The Engineering Community is also looking forward to our tour of the historic Allegheny Observatory during SLA's Annual Meeting in June 2025 which I arranged. This is part of the University of Pittsburgh and, weather permitting, we will be able to observe the Moon and Mars through their 13-inch telescope. 35 people from throughout SLA have signed up to attend.