The 2012-13 Fiscal Year was an exciting year for the A. T. Still Memorial Library. We added two new librarians – Harold Bright Electronic Resource’s Librarian – who is located in our AZ Branch but who serves the whole University Library and Margaret Hoogland – Distance Support Librarian – who is based in our MO Branch and primarily serves the distance programs based in the MO campus. We also reorganized the MO Branch and significantly upgraded the InterLibrary-Loan/document delivery services of that Branch with the promotion last July of Leisa Walter as head of that service.
In 12-13 we also made very significant upgrades to our digital resources. In the previous year we ran a trial of UptoDate, the most popular point of care support resources for physicians and Elsevier’s new product, ClinicalKey, which pulls together in multiple Elsevier e-resources in one platform with over 1,000 health and clinical e-books, over 500 clinical and health e-journals, FirstSearch, Elsevier’s point of care product, and a major collection of related images and videos. The response was so positive for both resources that we made a major shift in our collections and we were able to subscribe to both. We cancelled 25% of our print journals in our MO Branch (primarily expensive basic science titles that were little used) and almost all of our ScienceDirect Journal subscriptions to fund both of these key, new resources. The response to both of these products continues to be strongly positive.
In FY 13-14 we are planning on continuing to build our e-resources and to upgrade your ability to find what you need from among our large collections of resources. The first thing we have done in FY 2013-14 is added a major new resource – McGraw-Hill’s Access Medicine – to our collections. Some of you will remember that until about 3 years ago we had access to many of these important reference/textbooks via our StatRef subscription when McGraw-Hill pulled them from StatRef. We are now finally able to subscribe to this key resource. Some of the most well-known books in this collection are Harrison’s Online, Hurst’s The Heart, Schwartz’s Principles of Surgery, Sherris Medical Microbiology, and the full Lange Educational Library. Check in the New Resources tab of this newsletter for a full list of the titles in this valuable collection. Over the next few months we will be adding several new collections to our E-Book collection which will surpass 10,000 titles. Please take a few minutes and explore our catalog on the Library’s web site – I think you will be surprised and pleased with the scope of our E-book collection.
Finally, the Library is in the process of running a trial of a new product which should greatly simplify and improve your ability to locate and use the Library’s collections to more effectively locate evidence/information on specific topics. EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) is a new tool which should enable you to search the vast majority of the Library’s digital resources including E-Book, E-Journals, and videos in a single search. It will also enable the library to build a search tool that searches our major clinical point of care resources – UptoDate, FirstConsult, and ACP PIER – in a single search box. These two search tools in development will hopefully permit you to access and use almost the entire Library digital collection from two simple search boxes. More to come as we continue with the trial and, hopefully, implementation of this valuable new tool.
Mike Kronenfeld – University Librarian - mkronenfeld@atsu.edu