The Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Medical Library Association is very happy to announce that Carrie Baldwin-SoRelle is the winner of the 2024 MAC Award for Professional Excellence by a New Health Sciences Librarian.
Carrie is the Health Sciences Librarian and Liaison to the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill which she became in 2022. In her first year at the Health Sciences Library, she successfully built relationships with educators, researchers, administrators, and staff in the School of Public Health and led a collaborative approach to expanding information support and research instruction for the school. In the years since, she expanded embedded instruction throughout the public health curricula, implemented highly popular office hours within the school, and created a process for tracking and communicating library instruction sessions. Before Carrie started at UNC, the Health Sciences Library struggled to manage the public health students’ information and research support needs. Now, strategically aligned instruction sessions provide these 2,000+ students with information applicable to their course assignments and research needs, with fewer individual student consultations needed.
Carrie is a natural teacher, and instruction is the aspect of her role she’s most passionate about. Carrie teaches dozens of classes a semester, all of which are embedded in the curriculum. She thoughtfully and intentionally integrates active learning and practical applications of the material so students can truly learn and understand the material being covered. She highly values student feedback, routinely provides opportunities for them to provide it, and then identifies ways she can use it to better their experience in the future.
In addition to Carrie’s contributions to teaching and instruction, she’s also a valued research partner. She regularly partners on systematic reviews, specifically those with a public health focus. Most recently, Carrie partnered with others in the Gillings School of Public Health on a Lancet commissioned article focused on improving how lifesaving and-enhancing research is deployed globally, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Carrie has developed systematic literature searches for this project; her role is indispensable on this team, and without her, the work would not be possible. She also collaborates closely with the school’s research division to support their efforts to track scholarship output and measure impact.
Carrie has also become an expert on systematic reviews and scoping reviews within these few years. In her first full year here, she worked with research teams on nine systematic/scoping review projects and provided support for another two projects with other librarians. Since then, in addition to traditional SR methods and tools, she has also begun applying artificial intelligence tools to systematic reviews and bibliometric analyses. Beyond her individual skill development and work on reviews, Carrie also contributed to the collaborative work of the Health Sciences Library to support systematic reviews at UNC. She was part of the planning team for our annual systematic review summer workshop in 2023 when she organized and moderated a panel discussion of systematic review experts sharing their review experiences. This was so successful that she has reprised it twice since, once for a broad university audience at UNC Research Week and again this month for the Friends of the UNC Library Board. In each case, the panelists highlighted the importance of the library and librarians across the systematic review lifecycle, showing how she advances librarians as experts in evidence synthesis.
Carrie is highly valued by her colleagues within the Health Sciences Library, but also by students, faculty, and staff within the Gillings School of Public Health. Her commitment to professional excellence is unparalleled and she has accomplished so much in a short amount of time as a new health sciences librarian
