COLLECTIONS AND ACCESS
Real progress was made in 2001-2002 towards acquiring a digital
collection. By the end of the year, the Carpenter Library had a total of 927
electronic full-text journal subscriptions, 68 electronic textbooks, and
50 bibliographic databases. Subscriptions to Wiley Interscience and Lippincott
Williams and Wilkins added more than 100 titles. The Library continues to
enhance its collection by encouraging and participating in cooperative efforts
to share resources among North Carolina's health sciences libraries. The Wiley Interscience collection is a good example of consortia power. We
negotiated a site license with Wiley for the entire campus.
The Library added the Academic Press Idealibrary and
Elsevier’s ScienceDirect service to its collection of electronic journals. The
Library negotiated permission to access the ScienceDirect subscriptions held by
other subscriber libraries in the state (UNC Chapel Hill, Duke, East Carolina,
and others), allowing WFUBMC access to hundreds of additional titles. The
electronic version of Science magazine was added, enhancing the sharing of
electronic resources with the Reynolda Campus; the license portion for
Carpenter Library covers 1995 to the present, while the Reynolda Campus library
purchased the back files of Science covering 1885 to 1995. The Carpenter
Library
discontinued its print subscription to Science Citation Index (SCI) in favor of
the Reynolda Campus’ online version of SCI through the Web of Science.
MDConsult was purchased in conjunction with the NWAHEC, and the Carpenter
Library continued working closely with NWAHEC to improve the services of both
entities.
Links to all electronic titles were added to the catalog
[example: JAMA].
We registered with the National Library of Medicine for the
PubMed LinkOut program and added Library subscription information for both
electronic and print titles. PubMed users logging in through the Library's home
page see a WFUBMC icon attached to a Medline citation that will take the user to
the full text of the article. The LinkOut program, which allows free linkage to a greater number of electronic journals
than the costly OpenLinks in OVID, influenced our decision not to continue our
OVID Technologies subscription to Medline when it comes up for renewal in
September 2002.
An electronic journals database
was created that allows the user
to search not only by title but also by subject heading and by publisher. The
database also provides important holdings information for each title.
Journal
prices continue to rise at a rate of approximately 9% to 10% per year, and online
journals (when purchased as a companion to print) add an additional 10% to 20%.
Negotiations with the Library’s journal vendor, Ebsco, this year resulted in a
reduced service charge, allowing the Library to fund some of these
electronic purchases. Also, the Carpenter Library helped initiate a
nationwide embargo of the Nature Publishing Group titles, leading to much more
favorable terms for all libraries.
Most medical libraries seem to be renovating space and/or
planning to build new facilities, often using endowment moneys to help with some
of the funding. A report has been submitted to Facilities Planning to examine
space needs for the Carpenter Library. In the interim, the Carpenter
Library
continues to move infrequently-used bound journals to Piedmont Plaza to make
space for the more current bound volumes. Currently, there are 17,716 items in
the Piedmont Collection. Electricity and network wiring were installed in the
Library's stacks area, with the online catalog computer workstations to be
installed in the near future. This is part of the Library's long-term plan for
an all-electronic collection.
Use of the collection continues to go in opposite
directions. Print collection use (including audio-visuals) is trending
downwards:
*the "Journals (unbound)" number reflects the cessation of
unbound journals' circulation in 1997
At the same time, use of our online materials, including journals
and textbooks, is
skyrocketing:
Gate count (the number of persons physically using the Library)
declined:
The Library's Web site became one of the top three sites visited
on Wake Forest University Medical Center's server:
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