AAHL Lunch & Learn, October 6
Beyond Information: Digital Storytelling as a Way of Knowing with Dr. Mike Lang
Details: Tuesday, October 6, 12:00-1:00pm
Description: Medical librarians have long played a vital role in helping people find, evaluate, organize, and share knowledge. But not all health knowledge lives in journal articles, databases, or clinical guidelines. Some of what we most need to understand about health and illness is carried through lived experience and story.
In this presentation, Dr. Mike Lang will introduce Digital Storytelling as a participatory method for creating short, first-person films that bring lived experience into health research, education, and knowledge mobilization. Drawing on more than a decade of work with patients, family caregivers, healthcare providers, and communities, he will explore how digital stories can reveal forms of knowledge that are difficult to capture through conventional evidence alone.
The presentation will also consider the important role medical librarians can play in the emerging landscape of story-based knowledge: helping to curate narrative collections, support ethical access and reuse, connect stories with other forms of evidence, and ensure that lived-experience knowledge is not simply collected, but thoughtfully stewarded and meaningfully shared.
BIO: Dr. Mike Lang is an award-winning filmmaker, health researcher, Digital Storytelling facilitator, and Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Calgary, where he leads the Healing Lens Research Lab. He has directed and produced 10 industry-funded documentaries and web series exploring the human health experience, created numerous video-based health and wellness education curricula, and facilitated the creation of more than 1,000 digital stories with patients, family caregivers, and health care providers worldwide. He has authored 25 peer-reviewed publications exploring how digital storytelling and filmmaking can be used in health research, education, advocacy, and therapeutic contexts.
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Past Events
AAHL Summer Book Review Social, August 27, 2026
Whether you’re excited to share about your book-of-the-summer, or looking for your next great read, we hope you will us August 27th for our virtual lunchtime book review social!
Tell us about your favourite 2026 read!
Sign-up as a book reviewer. You’ll have 2-3 minutes to share a book you’ve read, what you loved, and why you’d recommend (or not).
Other ways to participate
- Take 1-2 minutes to share about a book you want to read, and why
- Join us to listen-in and learn about what AAHL members are reading!
AAHL Lunch & Learn, November 4, 2025
AI Academic Search Engines: What Health Science Librarians Need to Know
Speakers: Kaitlin Fuller & Erica Nekolaichuk
Erica Nekolaichuk is an instructional librarian with the Gerstein Science Information Centre at the University of Toronto. She has a Masters in the history of medicine from McGill and completed library school at Western University in 2012. She is a sessional lecturer in the Faculty of Information where she developed and occasionally teaches a course called Evidence-Based Healthcare for Librarians. Her current research interests are in testing the performance of academic AI search engines.
Kaitlin Fuller, MLIS, is a Scholarly Communications and Health Sciences Librarian at St. Francis Xavier University (StFX). Before joining StFX, she worked as a liaison librarian to the MD Program at the University of Toronto. Kaitlin has also taught as a co-instructor of the Health Sciences Literature & Information Resources course at Dalhousie University, as faculty in the Library and Information Technology program at Nova Scotia Community College, and as a sessional lecturer with the Institute of Medical Sciences at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include librarian teaching practices, search strategies for knowledge synthesis, and the evaluation of academic AI search engines.
We look forward to seeing you online!
AAHL Virtual Student Meet & Greet, October 29, 2025
The Association of Alberta Health Libraries (AAHL) Executive is hosting a virtual Fall Meet & Greet for students enrolled in Alberta Library Information Technology programs (SAIT and MacEwan) and the MLIS program at SLIS (University of Alberta).
Meet AAHL executive members and learn more about their career paths as health information professionals. Register below to join us. Bring your questions!
AAHL Fall Social: Virtual Meet and Greet, September 24, 2025
We are pleased to invite you to our inaugural AAHL event, the Fall Social: Virtual Meet and Greet, taking place on September 24, 2025, from 12:00 p.m.-1:00 p.m.
Join us for an hour of camaraderie and conversation, meet our AAHL Executive, and share any events and happenings at your workplace with fellow library colleagues.
We look forward to seeing you online!