"I use the library all the time ‚ without actually going there."
John Donoghue, Ph. D., Professor of Neurosciences
Brown Medical School faculty, students, and staff now have access
to a medical library that is more effective than ever in supporting
their goals of educating future generations of physicians, expanding
medical research, and improving the quality of health care for the
citizens of Rhode Island. Enhancing medical resources and services
has been a major goal of the Library for some time. Recent studies
showing that access to information has a positive effect on the
length of hospital stays and the costs of patient care, however,
have made these improvements more of a priority than ever. In addition,
the Division of Biology and Medicine and the Medical Schoolís seven
affiliated hospitals are now attracting more than $100 million annually
in federal and private funding. It is critical that researchers
have easy access to the literature and data they need to prepare
their grant proposals and to do their projects. Over the past few
years, the Library has succeeded in dramatically increasing the
number of clinical journals available, acquiring up-to-date medical
textbooks and monographs, and upgrading services both on and off
campus. These improvements were made possible by a number of factors.
Previously, as a result of journal cancellations and insignificant
increases in the acquisitions budget, the medical collection was
not meeting user needs. Fortunately, through the Libraryís membership
in the 
Northeast
Research Libraries Consortium (NERL) and the Boston
Library Consortium (BLC), the number of electronic journals
available to the community has increased significantly and at reasonable
cost. The Library now subscribes to over 4,000 electronic journals,
of which some 1,000 are medical titles that Brown had not previously
even owned in print. In the academic year 2000-01, users enjoyed
access to a total of 1,694 medical periodicals, in either print
or electronic form; in 1999-2000, that number was 784. These electronic
journals are from a variety of publishers, including Academic Press,
American Medical Association, BMJ Journals, Cambridge Press, Elsevier,
Harcourt Health Sciences, Kluwer, Oxford, and Wiley.
Another contributing factor has been the increase in the acquisitions
budget. In 2000, a report was submitted to Donald Marsh, Dean of
Medicine and Biological Sciences, that showed that Brownís budget
was 50 percent lower than the average for all U.S. medical school
libraries. The study also included data from a survey
of medical students by the Library User Needs Team (LUNT): 63
percent of the respondents were either "dissatisfied" or "very dissatisfied"
with the collection. As a result, the Medical School agreed to double
the Libraryís annual appropriation over the next five years through
a combination of annual base increments and fundraising. The increase
in funding has also enabled the Library to resume adding print and
electronic medical textbooks and monographs to the collection. There
are now subscriptions to MD Consult and STAT!Ref, which together
provide links to the latest editions of approximately 100 medical
textbooks. Fundraising efforts by the Medical Library Coordinator
and the Development Office have resulted in several endowments and
gifts. For example, the Brown University Library Collections in
Medicine Endowment, established in memory of Mary Lou Gilbane Carolan
by her family, enables us to purchase materials on scleroderma,
lupus, connective tissue disorders, arthritis and musculosketetal
disorders, and internal medicine.
As important as these developments were, most of the Brown medical
community would not have felt the impact of this expansion were
it not for recent technological advancements. Thanks to the Web,
and Brownís implementation of off-campus
access service, users in hospitals, offices, homes, and abroad
can get to the Libraryís electronic resources via their service
provider. Once connected to our network, they can use all the electronic
resources available on campus. The gateway to all the online medical
resources available to the Brown community is through "medical
connections", which includes links to databases, evidence-based
health care resources, online textbooks and journals, and sites
outside Brown.
One of the main challenges of having a medical school without its
own library has been providing resources to about 2,000 faculty
members, as well as students and staff, located all over the state.
A number of services and outreach activities are designed to address
this. The off- campus access mentioned above is of utmost importance
to these users, who can ask questions about it by contacting Computing
and Information Services or the Library by telephone or e-mail.
The
BioMed
Reference librarians, Janet Crager and Frank Kellerman, provide
assistance and instruction in the use of Library resources either
in person, by phone or through e-mail They can meet with an individual
or a group/class in the Sciences Library, in a departmental meeting
or in an office. Faculty can use electronic
forms to request articles and books not held by the hospitals
or Brown. Articles are now being sent electronically from the Sciences
Library, reducing delivery time by two to three days. To keep medical
faculty up-to-date on new resources and services, e-mail messages
are sent through the Office of Medical Faculty Affairs. Medical
students receive information through listserv e-mails and in The
Pulse, their newsletter.
Enhanced resources and services also result from the efforts of
the Brown/Affiliated Hospital Libraries Committee. The Committee
streamlined the procedure for the receipt of a temporary Library
access card and is currently developing an outreach program for
residents that will include information on the University and hospital
libraries. This program is the result of a LUNT survey
of off-campus faculty indicating that residents were the most
dissatisfied users.
The goals of the medical library include continued expansion of
its collection, improved services, harnessing technology, and working
collaboratively with the Medical School and the affiliated hospital
librarians, all to the benefit of the Brown medical community. [A
version of this article appeared in the School of Medicineís Faculty
Update, v. 22. No. 1, Jan.-March, 2002. Ed.]-
- TovahReis
http://www.brown.edu/Facilities/University_Library
