Introduction: Health sciences librarians are currently seeing a shift in the workforce as many leaders are approaching retirement, leaving leadership positions open for professional organizations to restructure and fill with new leaders educated with specific leadership offerings. This study aims to investigate pressing needs for leaders in the profession and how those needs will shape future leaders in national and international organizations of health sciences librarianship.
Methods: This study used a mixed-methods design to quantitatively and qualitatively analyze the attitudes and perceptions of leaders in the profession regarding opportunities for leadership development and their current needs and priorities. Researchers designed and piloted a survey on Qualtrics to identify pressing leadership needs and how professional organizations can develop better educational offerings to support these needs. The survey invitation and link were distributed to relevant health sciences listservs in North America. The qualitative analysis developed key themes utilizing Taguette.
Results: Among 157 survey respondents, most were academic health sciences librarians (n=87), followed by hospital librarians (n=51), with fewer from other settings. Senior leaders were underrepresented, suggesting turnover or survey reach limitations. Qualitative analysis revealed inconsistent mentorship, program suitability, and insufficient topic depth. The most important leadership skills centered around advocacy, management, and strong leadership vision.
Discussion: Findings suggest a growing need for cost-effective and targeted training for leadership in health sciences libraries. Particularly in accessibility, relevance, and mentorship opportunities, ensuring educational programs better equip librarians for leadership roles. Recommendations will aim to align training with participant needs and foster a more robust leadership pipeline.

Introduction: This presentation details an assessment of SEARCH AI, a home grown semantic search tool built using generative AI that empowers patrons to query the library catalog using plain, natural language.

Methods: Three health sciences librarians conducted a comparative study to assess the efficacy of SEARCH AI against traditional catalog searching. The study utilized actual Fall 2025 undergraduate health sciences student research topics to query the catalog. For each topic, a traditional search was compared to an AI-generated search. Data collected included the number of results, and the relevancy of the first ten results to the student's research need. Furthermore, the AI-generated Boolean search strings were assessed for accuracy using a subset of criteria from the PRESS checklist.

Results: Initial findings suggest SEARCH AI has the potential to enhance the discoverability of resources for novice users, transforming conversational searches into more complex Boolean queries.

Discussion: The results will be used to directly inform the development of an integrated library instruction module focused on educating health sciences students on the strategic, critical use of this AI search feature, teaching them not only how to use the tool but also how to interpret its output (specifically the generated Boolean strings) to foster advanced search proficiency—a cornerstone of evidence-based practice.