Library and Information Science Program
Associate Professor, School of Information Sciences
Training Program
Faculty, Department of Biomedical Informatics, School of Medicine
University of Pittsburgh - Pittsburgh PA 15260 - USA
phone:
412-624-9444 - FAX: 412-648-7001
email/internet:
ellen@mail.sis.pitt.edu
World Wide Web:
http://www2.sis.pitt.edu/~ellen/
Ellen Detlefsen is a tenured faculty member in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh, with a joint appointment in the Department of Biomedical Informatics in the School of Medicine. She was educated at Smith College and Columbia University, and holds her doctorate from the Columbia University School of Library Service. Her areas of expertise and teaching competence include bio-medical and health sciences information, medical informatics, and resources and services for special populations such as patients and health care consumers, and the aging and their caregivers. The Departmental program in Medical Librarianship and Medical Informatics, which she directs, was ranked #1 in the nation in the 1999, and again in the 2006, U.S. News & World Report's Guide to Graduate Study; the MLIS with a medical specialization is now available in both the on-campus format and in the University's FastTrack online program.
She is an active member of the Medical Library Association where she has been Chair of the Relevant Issues Section, Chair of the Medical Library Education Section, and Chair of the Pittsburgh Regional Chapter. She has served terms on both the national Chapter Council and the national Section Council of MLA and she is currently a member of the 2008 national MLA Nominating Committee. She has taught CE courses for the NAHSL, MAC, Pittsburgh, and Hawaii-Pacific chapters of MLA and for several state-wide groups, as well as at national MLA conferences. In May of 2002, she was honored by the Medical Library Association with the Lucretia McClure Excellence in Education Award, the organization's highest honor for an educator. She is an Associate Editor for the Jourmal of the Medical Library Association and edits a quarterly column on medical library eduation for the MLA News.
In early 2007, she was invited by the National Library of Medicine to serve on a fact-finding team to assess medical library education and medical library capacity in Vietnam. Most recently, the WISE [Web-based Information Science Education] consortium awarded her the 2007 WISE Faculty of the Year Award for Excellence in Online Education.
Recent publications by Dr. Detlefsen include articles on health informatics, research informationists, the education of an informationist, on World Wide Web materials on women's health and on depression in the elderly, on the information behavior of health professionals, and on changes in library education in response to a changing healthcare and medical school environment.
She speaks frequently on the issues related to both formal and continuing education for the health information professions, on information behavior research, on consumer healthcare information, and on medical informatics. She is also the developer of, and regular instructor for, Internet workshops for the American College of Psychiatrists, the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry, and the American Medical Association's Medical Communications Conference. She is also the Chief of the Information Dissemination Unit in the University of Pittsburgh's NIMH-funded research center on mood disorders in late life; this work involves serving as an "information specialist in context" for the research center's executive team.
From 1998 through 2003, she was Project Director for the Highmark Minority Health Link initiative, which sought to educate African American medical librarians and information specialists. Dr. Detlefsen has on-going research interests in the information behaviors of health professionals and healthcare consumers, especially those who are elderly or from a minority group, and the development of educational programs for health information specialists.
She is also the curator of an unofficial "museum of antique information technology." Among the more than 200 items in the collection are the sliderule from her high school physics class, a mid-nineteenth century tabletop printing press with a tray of type, a 1915 Underwood typewriter, a genuine IBM Port-a-punch, five sets of prayer beads from various faith traditions, two abacuses, an Addometer and an Addiator, a genuine Gaylord Fine Calculator/Computer and a state-of-the-art luggable Compaq portable PC from 1985. She occasionally leads a doctoral seminar on the History of Information Technology.
Outside of work, she tries to cope with a co-professional family (her spouse is a internationally-known physician-researcher who investigates mood disorders in late life), two sons and a daughter-in-law (a pediatrics resident and a lawyer in Portland ME, and a graduate student in public health at Columbia University in New York City), a geriatric chocolate lab named "Beau," and two historic district homes. She is active in her Episcopal parish, and in the summer Tabernacle in Thousand Island Park NY. She is trying to be a good soup cook. She is an email addict, and she collects hippopotami, lustre pitchers, and egg cups. Her favorite quotes are "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem," and "Knowledge is the best prescription."