January 2003
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the Newsletter of the School of Medicine Library, From the Director
As we enter the new year, there are numerous exciting
developments to report from the School of Medicine Library.
The Library is participating in a large consortial deal with the National Science Foundation Electronic Science Information Group (ESIG). ESIG is a group of libraries in the various EPSCoR states. The purpose of ESIG is to enable participating libraries to better provide scientific, medical, and technical information to their researchers, who are eligible to participate in the National Science Foundation's EPSCoR program. This deal will provide School of Medicine users with new access to over 200 medical e-journals in 2003. Because of the size of the joint journal holdings between the 47 libraries in ESIG, we are able to participate in this deal for minimal cost, under $1,000. This is further evidence of the power of consortial purchasing for libraries! For more information on ESIG, visit their website at http://www.lib.montana.edu/~bmorton/esig/
We are pleased to announce that the Library is a key partner in a grant recently awarded to Palmetto Health Richland Hospital from the National Library of Medicine in the amount of $76,988 to create GeriatricWeb: a geriatric digital library. The grant is part of the National Library of Medicine's Internet Access to Digital Libraries grant program. We are exited about this important collaboration between librarians at the School of Medicine and geriatricians at Palmetto Health Richland.
Ruth Riley, Director of Library Services Return to the Table of Contents History of Medicine Room
 With great pleasure, Dean Larry R. Faulkner recently announced that the Library's newly renovated History of Medicine Room will be named in honor of Dr. Charles S. Bryan, Heyward Gibbes Professor of Medicine and Associate Dean and Director of the USC/Palmetto Health Alliance Center for Medical Humanities. Dr. Bryan has provided a generous gift to create the USC School of Medicine Library Endowment. The endowment will provide support for Preservation of the rare book collection housed in the room, the acquisition of additional historical works, the purchase of books for the general circulating collection, and support in other specialized areas of the Library. A dedication of the room was held on January 15, 2003. We are very grateful to Dr. Bryan for his wonderful support and commitment to the Library.
Ruth Riley, Director of Library Services Return to the Table of Contents
This past summer, the Library faculty and staff engaged in a
day-long retreat to brainstorm about its 2002-2003 strategic plan. The faculty and
staff conducted an environmental scan by reviewing copies of current strategic plans
from the School of Medicine, the USC University Libraries, the USC Division of
Libraries and Instructional Services, the USC Office of Information Technology, and
USC Computer Services. We also reviewed the feedback received from our users in
the LibQual+ user satisfaction survey conducted in May 2002. The outcome of these
fruitful deliberations was an ambitious plan of action in 2002-2003. Please visit the
Strategic Plan webpage (http://uscm.med.sc.edu/LIBRARY/PLAN.SHTML for the full text of the plan.
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The Library is pleased to report on a collaboration with a
School of Medicine faculty member that is a good step towards having the library and
its resources more integrated into the medical school curriculum. Dr. Clarke Millette,
Professor, Cell & Developmental Biology & Anatomy, and course director for histology
in the M-I year, approached the Library about incorporating informatics into the essay
assignment for histology. Sarah Gable and Ruth Riley met with him and offered the
option of creating a web page for the assignment that would have hot links to the full
text articles that he had been distributing in hard copy. The advantages are several:
1) Saves paper. 2) Familiarizes students with the use of e-journals. 3) The electronic
versions of the articles provide students with color images that may be viewed from
their laptops. Many e-journals also offer the option of viewing enlarged images.
Students accessed the assignment via the M-I schedule on the School of Medicine
website. Many thanks to Dr. Millette for his interest in working with the Library on
this effort, and to Sarah Gable, Associate Director, and Lisa Antley-Hearn, Library
Web Manager, for helping make it happen.
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The School of Medicine Library has recently licensed access to
Medical Matrix, a medical search engine and directory of medical sites on the
Internet. This resource is a project of the American Medical Informatics Association's
Internet Working Group. It retrieves peer reviewed clinical resources from over 6,000
annotated medical web sites selected by the Medical Matrix editorial board to
provide health professionals with point-of-care information. Sites are reviewed by a
team of physicians and medical librarians and ranked using a 5 star rating system.
Quality, peer review, full content, multimedia features, and unrestricted access are
emphasized in the rankings. To locate information you can search the descriptions
and titles of the resources or you can browse by broad subject sections. Links are
checked continuously by an automated system so that search results will link
properly. From the USC School of Medicine
Library homepage, you can link to Medical Matrix by clicking on Databases in the
Electronic Resources section or Biomedical Sites in
the Biomedical Links section. Note: a username, password, and email address are
required; more information is available on the "Databases" or "Biomedical Sites"
pages.
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The Library has a 500-volume collection of rare medical books
housed in the newly named "Charles S. Bryan History of Medicine Room" (see From the
Director). To locate these materials in SCarlit, the Library's online catalog,
follow these steps:
The rare books are for use in the History of Medicine Room only. For questions
regarding this collection, contact Laura Kane at laura@med.sc.edu 0r at 733-3352.
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Print versions of all Elsevier, Academic Press, American
Chemical Society, American Society for Microbiology, and Kluwer journal titles have
been canceled. The Library is subscribing to the online only beginning 2003. Previous
to this year, the first title we subscribed to only online was the Journal of Biological
Chemistry. In 2002, print issues of a number of Elsevier titles were canceled,
including Brain Research. Since there has been no negative feedback from patrons,
we now cancel more print with less trepidation. Print cancellations have funded the
one-time purchase of online versions of the journals, but in actuality very little cost
savings is realized when we cancel print versions of journals, as the online is subject
to inflation and price increases just as the print is. However, the Library does save
on binding, reshelving, and shelving costs incurred by print journals.
At least one faculty member did mention to us, when contacted regarding the print
cancellations, that the Current Reading Room we maintain in the Library will soon be
deserted if print cancellations continue. Based on this observation, it has been
decided to maintain for now a print subscription to a title if it meets two criteria that
would qualify it as a heavily-read journal:
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Within the last year the Library installed a proxy server to
make off-campus access to our electronic resources easy and convenient for School of
Medicine students, faculty, and staff. To use the proxy server all you need is the
username and password you use to sign on to your School of Medicine p-mail or
Groupwise account (your Novell logon). Unfortunately, there are some
exceptions.
Some publishers and content providers require the Library to issue separate
usernames and passwords for their specific resources. To name a few, Academic
Medicine, Gerontology, Oncology, and Southern
Medical Journals all require usernames and passwords different from your proxy
server login. Additionally, Medical Matrix and
Reprotox are two websites that require passwords. So how do
you know which have passwords and which don't?
Simple. When you are using the SOM
E-Journals webpage, and you click on a journal title, look in the
Restrictions field. If you see the following comment....
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Here are a few examples of actual titles:
Laura Kane, Head of Cataloging & Acquisitions Return to the Table of Contents
October was a busy month for the Center for Disability
Resources Library. Roz McConnaughy and Sarah Gable presented a paper about the
CDR Library titled "Marketing the Special Collection in a Health Sciences Library" at
the Southern Chapter Meeting of the Medical Library Association in Nashville, TN.
There were exhibits about the CDR Library at the following conferences held in
Columbia:
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Contents.
Four years ago, e-journals accounted for less than 10% of our
journal collection, with the print medium dominating. In 2002-2003, any use of print
by patrons was the exception, rather than the rule. Except for the less than 20% of
our journal collection which is still not available online, overwhelmingly journal use is
electronic. These changes have been dramatic and unrelenting -- with out electronic
access essentially doubling each of the last 3 years. It seems inevitable that all
biomedical literature will soon be available in electronic format.
SOM Library tracking of print and electronic use has confirmed that a title being
online is no longer a luxury but a necessity. Print use in general has declined, even
for titles which do not have electronic versions. Library patrons have quickly become
used to electronic formats and prefer not to use the print unless absolutely
necessary.
Journals owned by the School of Medicine have also been sprouting their electronic
versions and the Library is purchasing online access for titles for which the print has
proven use. We are also, with Thomas Cooper Library, moving ahead with the
cancellation of print titles, if doing so will allow us to purchase the online versions.
This is an unsettling but financially necessary development, which everyone is hoping
will not come back to haunt us in the future.
This past year has seen an unprecedented number of inter-library agreements to
provide cooperative electronic access to e-journals. This has included cancellation of
duplicate biomedical titles between Thomas Cooper Library and the School of
Medicine saving over $70,000 between the two institutions, grant fund purchasing of
Nature Publishing titles for South Carolina BRIN participants, Kluwer journal access
through consortial purchasing with other EPSCOR institutions, and continued joint
purchasing of American Chemical Society titles and American Society of Microbiology
journals.
As of January 2003, three-fourths (3,574) of all MEDLINE titles can be accessed in full
text through PubMed, where the Library owns access rights. SOM patrons have online
full-text access to 1000+ of the 4,600 titles indexed in MEDLINE (a good number of the
full-text titles which link in PubMed are available to the School of Medicine through
Thomas Cooper Library journals subscriptions, and our addition of the Kluwer package
of 200+ titles, gives our patrons additional online access to 109 of these MEDLINE
titles.
For 2003-2004, the Library will continue to explore advantageous agreements and
make collection development decisions that will increase our patrons' online access
to biomedical journals.
Inflation Not Lower For Journals
Although inflation rates have fallen for everything else
around, the aggregate increase of Scientific, Technical, and Medical (STM) journals by
publishers has not fallen any lower than 10%. Since journals are the largest material
of a medical library's budget, this means that every year there is not a budget
increase for journals, subscriptions must be cut or other large cost savings measures
must be instituted. Just thought we'd remind everyone that the journal pricing crisis
continues.
TDNet -- Another Journal Access
Point
Thomas Cooper Library's purchase of TDNet, an e-journal
management product, which will become operational in early 2003, will give the
Library the option of using this new system. Our plan is to use it as a side-by-side
access point to our e-journal webpage (somjournals.sc.edu) until comparisons are
made on functionality and ease of use. Patrons will be notified when the School of
Medicine Library's TDNet is available for use.
Karen Rosati, Head of Serials
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The Journals@Ovid portion of OVID should generally be
avoided while conducting MEDLINE searches. It is easily mistaken as a way to search
and retrieve only full-text articles. Although there are several dozen full-text
journals you can access through Journals@Ovid, you eliminate over 900 other full-text
journals that are available through our OVID subscription.
Most regular OVID users are aware of the "OVID Full Text" link available under some
search results. This link provides easy access to a full-text version of the citation
under which it appears. "OpenLink Full Text" is another brand new link that will
frequently appear under OVID search results. It also will retrieve the full text of the
article.
So what's the difference? "OVID Full Text" links are journals we pay for from OVID.
"OpenLink Full Text" represents subscriptions from other sources. So when you
retrieve an OpenLink article you actually leave OVID's website and go to the
publisher's or provider's website. We've increased full-text access in OVID over
1800% through utilizing the band new OpenLink feature. However, there is one
downside.
When you use the "Limit to Full Text" function, you are limiting to only the several
dozen journals we pay for through OVID. You will actually reduce full-text retrieval
in most cases. One option to consider instead is "Limit to Local Holdings." Many
more of these titles will be available full-text online than in "Limit to Full Text."
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Though most of her day is spent immersed in "technical services" duties behind the
scenes, you may spot Ms. Kane staffing the Reference Desk during the week. "I really
enjoy the technical aspects of my job," she says, "but it's nice to be able to interact
directly with students and faculty on a regular basis." Last year, the Library
implemented a schedule that allows all the library faculty to work with the public on
a weekly basis.
Ms. Kane is in the process of writing a book for the American Library Association
entitled Voices From the Workforce: A First-Hand Guide to Careers in Library and
Information Science. The book, scheduled for publication in early 2004, will
feature interviews of over thirty librarians working in a variety of libraries.
"Recruitment of new librarians is going to be a huge issue within the next decade,
when the majority of the workforce reaches retirement age," Ms. Kane says. "Today,
there are more opportunities than ever for professional librarians. It is my hope that
this book will help recruit and retain more people in the field." Ms. Kane has also
recently written a chapter for the Encyclopedia of Library and Information
Science entitled "Access Versus Ownership," due to be published within the
next few months.
Ms. Kane serves on a number of committees, including the Library's Newsletter
Committee, where she has been chair and/or co-chair for eight years. She is a
member of the Faculty Senate and the SOM Library Committee. She maintains active
memberships in the Medical Library Association, the Southern Chapter of the Medical
Library Association, and the American Library Association, and attends conferences
when possible. She is also the current President of CAMLA, the Columbia Area
Medical Librarians Association.
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Return to the Table of Contents Library Hours and General InformationHours:Monday - Friday 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. Saturday - 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday - 1 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Telephone Number: (803) 733-3344 Fax Number: (803) 733-1509
Address: Home Page: http://uscm.med.sc.edu/LIBRARY/LIBRARY.SHTML Return to the Table of Contents Newsletter Committee
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This page was last updated 27 January 2003.
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2003, The Board of Trustees of the University of South Carolina.
URL: http://uscm.med.sc.edu/LIBRARY/com29.htm
