Libraries without limits:

changing needs - changing roles

Utrecht, 22-27 June 1998

EAHIL / AEBIS

ABSTRACTS OF ORAL PRESENTATIONS

Thursday 25 June Room A 9.00

Copyright and the Electronic Library

Propriété Intellectuelle de l'Information

Charles Oppenheim

Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK

 

There is a danger of increasing tension between librarians and copyright owners because of proposed changes in copyright law. Over the past few years, relationships between librarians and publishers have become less difficult as publishers have recognised that librarians' requests to digitise the full text of articles represents more an opportunity than a threat. However, pressure from copyright owners such as the software and entertainment industries have led to proposals to strengthen copyright law. In particular, there are proposals to introduce a new brwosing right, to introduce a new transmission right, to make the tampering with electronic Copyright Management Systems a criminal offence, and to change exceptions to copyright (including library privilege) in the digital environment. Such changes, if carried through, would have a profound negative impact on the relationship, always tense, between publishers and librarians. It could, indeed, lead to the breakdown of the learned publishing industry and on libraries. It is in the interest of both parties to ensure that the proposed changes to the law do not come about.

Thursday 25 June Room A 9.30

Libraries without Limits: Limited by Copyright?

Bibliothèques sans Limites: Limité par les droits de reproduction?

Madeleine de Cock Buning

Institute for Information Law, University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Law / De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek - Lawyers, Amsterdam, NL

 

Copyright law creates a category of "intellectual property". It offers statutory regulation of the competing interests of right-holders and end-users of information. The balance that traditionally exists between those interests seems to be in jeopardy by recent technological developments. How can this balance be (re)found? Libraries have a two-fold position in the information spectrum. On one hand they are information consumers, on the other, they develop more and more independent publishing activities. It is important to keep this two-fold position in mind when addressing the question: "Libraries without limits, limited by copyright?"

Thursday 25 June Room A 10.30

East and West: a Collaboration Experience amongst Biomedical University Libraries

Coopération Est-Ouest: une Expérience dans le Domaine des Bibliothèques Universitaires Biomédicales

Arlette Pailley-Katz, Hélène Debost, Isabelle Eudes, Elisabetta Marinoni, Pierangela Mazzon, Grazia Morra, Donata Pieri, Lindita Papadhopulli, Suzana Zaloshnja

Bibliotèque de l'Université Paris 7 - Denis Diderot, Paris, France

 

The major aim of the three years lasting European Community Project TEMPUS, is the re-qualification and modernisation of didactics at the Faculty of Medicine of the Tirana University. A part of this project concerns the Medical Library of the Tirana University which is the only medical library in Albania. In order to make this Library fitting the basic European standards both the Library of the Faculty of Medicine Lariboisiere Saint-Louis of University Paris 7 and the Biological-Medical Library 'A. Vallisneri', have been involved for consultancy and support.

The project of collaboration among the three libraries has been organised at two different levels, one concerning tutorial and modernisation activities for albanian librarians, the other focused on the elaboration of a project to update the Albanian Medical Library tools.

The tutorial and updating activities have been taking place in French and Italian Libraries establishing specific stages lasting each one month. The project, thanks to the TEMPUS economic support, would allow the Tirana University Medical Library to provide the more common facilities available in all the other European medical libraries.

The major problem that all librarians involved in TEMPUS project, either Italians, French and Albanians, has had to face concerned the different levels of library organisation in their own country. The actual French and Italian tools in library management were completely unknown by Albanian librarians. This, from one side, forced west librarians to find the most efficient and easy way to explain and transfer their knowledge to the east ones, and, from the other side forced, the Albanian librarians to learn in few months what west librarians learnt and settled in more than ten years. West librarians had, in addition, to choose which of the usually applied technology would have the most fitting features for the Tirana Medical Library, in order to both improve the quality of the facilities and to avoid a distressful change in work organisation. According to this approach it has been suggested, for instance, to adopt a computerised system of cataloguing producing also the traditional paper cards. The adoption of an exclusively computerised system could likely have raised discomfort to the end-users of the Tirana Medical Library, not yet used to these systems.

This opportunity of collaboration among librarians coming from different work realities and with different backgrounds has been extremely positive and has opened new perspectives of future European collaboration and integration in the management of University libraries.

Dans le cadre des programmes TEMPUS de la Commission des Communautés Européennes, l'Université Paris 7 - Denis Diderot et l'Université de Padoue se sont associées afin de requalifier et de moderniser les programmes des études médicales de la faculté de médecine de l'Université de Tirana.

L'un des axes du projet concerne la bibliothèque médicale albanaise.

Afin de restructurer cette bibliothèque selon les normes européennes, la bibliothèque de la faculté de médecine Lariboisière - Saint - Louis de l'Université Paris 7 et la bibliothèque biomedicale "A. Vallisneri" de l'université de Padoue sont impliquées en tant que consultants pour la conception et la mise en oeuvre du projet.

La collaboration entre les trois bibliothèques a été conçue à deux niveaux différents:

le premier concerne la formation des bibliothécaires albanaise;

le second se concentre sur l'éboration du projet de modernisation de la bibliothèque médicale albanaise à la fois pour le développement des collections et les nouveaux accès à l'information.

La formation et la mise à jour des pratiques documentaires se sont déroulées dans chacune des deux bibliothèques française et italienne au cours de deux stages spécifiques d'une durée de un mois. L'élaboration d'un projet de réorganisation réaliste pour la bibliothèque de Tirana apparaît bien comme la partie la plus délicate du projet, d'une part en raison de l'absence totale d'infrastructures essentielles à la modernisation, d'autre part du fait de ressources économiques limitées en Albanie.

Aujourd'hui, un projet structuré a été mis au point. Ce projet, financé dans le cadre du programme TEMPUS, permettra à la bibliothèque médicale de l'université médicale de Tirana d'offrir à ses usagers les services présents dans toutes les autres bibliothèques médicales européennes.

La difficulté majeure réside dans le fait que tous les bibliothécaires impliqués dans ce projet TEMPUS, - italiens, français et albanais-, se confrontent à des modèles bibliothéconomiques différents suivant les pays. Les modèles français et italiens, et les développements technologiques appliqués à la documentation et à l'information scientifique et technique dans ces deux pays ne sont pas connus des bibliothécaires albanais.

Ceci a pour conséquence d'obliger les bibliothécaires de l'ouest: à mettre en oeuvre une pédagogie simple et efficace pour expliquer et transmettre en quelques mois des connaissances acquises et expérimentées sur des années.

Les bibliothécaires de l'est: de surcroît sont impliquées dans le choix d'applications technologiques courantes qui seraient les mieux adaptées pour la bibliothèque médicale de Tirana.

Il s'agit de faciliter les procédures de travail et d'en améliorer la qualité, tout en évitant les changements qui pourraient s'avérer désastreuz en termes d'organisation.

Pour illustrer cette approche, il a été suggéré, par exemple, d'adopter un système de catalogage informatisé qui produise également les traditionelles fiches "papier". le choix d'une système totalement informatisé aurait certainement entraViné des inconvénients pour l'usager final de la bibliothèque médicale de Tirana, encore peu formé à ces pratiques de travail.

L'opportunité d'une collaboration entre bibliothécaires venant d'horizons différents et confrontés à des pratiques professionelles différentes s'est révélée extrêmement positive et a ouvert des perspectives nouvelles de coopération européenne dans le domaine de l'organisation et du management des bibliothèques universitaires.

Thursday 25 June Room A 11.00

A model for International Cooperation in the Creation of Structured Access to Quality Information in Veterinary Medicine, Agricultural Sciences and Forestry

Un modèle pour la Coopération Nationale en vue de la Création d'un Accès Structuré à une Information de qualité en Médecine Vétérinaire, Agronomie et Sylviculture

Teodora Oker-Blom, Sinikka Suckcharoen, Kristiina Hormia-Poutanen

Veterinary Medicine Library & Agricultural Library of the University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

 

The paper describes a model for working across country boundaries to build a subject-based information gateway to high quality information resources on the Internet in veterinary medicine, agricultural sciences and forestry. Eight libraries, among them all veterinary medicine libraries, in the 5 Nordic countries cooperate in the project. It was initiated in 1996 by the Finnish Agricultural Library of Helsinki University within the framework of the NOVA university. This university is a cooperative organisation established by the national universities of Forestry, Veterinary and Agricultural Sciences in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway & Sweden.

The information gateway is thus called NOVAGate (http://utb32.bibul.slu.se/nig/).The NOVAGate project aims initially at a comprehensive coverage of services in the Nordic countries. They are to start with databases, library catalogues, electronic journals, news and mailing lists, organizations and training material. Later it will proceed to cover relevant international resources as well. In this case linkage to other similar services is of interest.

The service will provide users with web access to a database with good search and browse facilities through a well structured and user friendly interface. This is necessary if the researchers, teachers and students, for whom the service is principally designed, are to gain access to the relevant and rapidly expanding number of Internet resources available. The ROADS software, which uses the IAFA templates and the WHOIS++interoperability, has been chosen to guarantee a sharable, distributed systems platform.

We will describe the process of cooperation, how the working methods were defined and shared, from the definition of the model for the service, its technical basis and subject structure, the design of templates, to the establishment of the database and the development of the WWW user interface. The education and production of common guidelines for decentralized updating of NOVAGate and the evaluation of it by the participating libraries will be emphasized. We will finally discuss the functionality of this model of cooperation and possible linkage to other similar services.

Thursday 25 June Room B 10.30

Citation Analysis of Biomedical Publications: a Customer Orientated Service in Medical Libraries

Ulrich Korwitz

German National Library of Medicine, Cologne, Germany

 

'Publish or perish' is still a dictate for every scientist in the biomedical field.

In order to promote his professional career a scientist has to publish numerous papers. But the number of publications alone placed in journals is not relevant anymore. It becomes more and more important to know where to publish.

Which journals are read by the scientific community?

What are the journals with the highest impact in the different fields?

Where should manuscripts be submitted?

How can the relevance of individual publications be recognized?

These are the questions raised daily by customers in our libraries. And medical librarians can help their customers to answer these questions using simple bibliometric analyses.

The tools are prepared by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in Philadelphia, USA. They allow to identify high impact journals on one hand and determine the relevance of individual publications on the other.

Bibliometric statistics are very helpful tools but (like any statistical data) have to be studied carefully: any over-interpretation has to be avoided. The medical librarian as an intermediate between the scientist and the publication is the right expert to handle and explain the data. He can offer his expert opinion as a value-added service in the modern customer orientated library.

Unfortunely this paper will not be presented

Review of Bibliometric Research of Oncological Literature

Vladimir S. Lazarev, E.P. Ivanov, D.A. Yunusova

Research Institute of Hematology and Blood Transfusion of the Health Ministry, Minsk, Republic of Belarus

 

Oncology is the medical discipline of the highest scattering of publications in periodicals: about 100 specialized periodicals, publications in more than 2,500 other periodical titles, more than 3,500 periodicals cited by oncologists. Such a high scattering (cf. e.g. with hematology: the level of scattering is an order less) caused an extreme attention of bibliometricians to this discipline. In terms of librarianship this scattering means that in spite of an excellent on-line and CD-ROMs information services in oncology, there is a problem of selection even of specialized top value and productive primary printed periodicals for oncological library acquisition, not saying about the periodicals beyond the 'core zone' of scattering to be read by oncologists in the first order: there are both readers who prefer periodicals in printed form (but not network access or periodicals on CD-ROMs) and libraries that have no net access.

Bibliometric research is a remedy for the selection of primary printed periodicals as well as for the selection of the proper abstracting service. Our review includes the data on the more than 20 relevant bibliometric publications and features the original goals and targets of a research; methods used in a study; a kind of documentary information flow (DIF) under study (documents used / unused being a basic division, the variations of the the use are being featured); characteristics of DIF structural elements under study; chronological, thematic and spices limitations of a study; structural characteristics of DIF studied in reviewed publications; comments of original goals and additional advantages of a study. General analytical comments are also presented in the review.

Some recommendations on oncology library stocks formation and development are given as an immediate result of the review. In addition, the results of the two recent studies of DIFs in leukemia fulfilled by the authors will be presented.

Thursday 25 June Room C 10.30

Document Delivery in Biomedical Field: Results of an International Survey

Laurent Ghirardi, Madeleine Wolff-Terroine

PEGASOS/ICC, Paris, France

 

EUROLUG, the european federation of the associations of electronic information systems users, has undertaken in 1995, then in 1996 an international survey in order to evaluate the type and the quality of the document delivery services in Europe and to follow their evolution.

More than 13.000 photocopies orders coming from 189 organisations were analysed. The statistical analysis has essentially turned on the following parameters:

- documents type

- ordering methods (fax, e-mail, telephone.....)

- delivery methods (fax, mail, courier)...,

- delivery delay

- non-reception and their origins

- cost (normal, reduced, free of charge...)

- suppliers.

Crossings were done among the various types of data, showing often data far from these given by the suppliers. The same survey was undertaken in the United States by ASIDIC, the american counterpart of EUSIDIC. The whole set of american and european results has been processed and analysed by AFUSIE, the french member of EUROLUG.

The Health field (hospital libraries, academic libraries, drug industries) has supplied on its own more than twenty per cent of the data. Therefore, it was interesting to study if this field can be distinguished by some specificity, if differences could be put in evidence between Europe and United States and if the current circulating ideas on document delivery did square with the observed facts.

Now, if all around the world, the periodical articles represent more than 90% of the orders, profound differences are appearing for ordering mode: 28,5% of documents are ordered by post in Europe versus 3,3% in United States. Contrary to the received views, mail continues to be the far used mode for the reception of documents (more than 84%), nearly one on five orders does not receive any answer, the average delay for the reception of documents is 6,1d+3,4.!

The whole of the parameters enumerated above will be detailed. An analysis of the causes of the observed facts will be attempted and the outlined trends will be shown.

Thursday 25 June Room C 11.00

The Cost of Document Delivery and the Library Services Performance.

Giuseppe Merlo, Valentina Comba

University of Torino, Central Medical Library, Torino, Italy

 

The document delivery service is one of the most important in a medical library. Recent improvements in the electronic document delivery and the rapid change of the marketplace is bringing the Document Delivery Service (DDS) in a new interesting context.

This paper reviews the major vendors in term of cost, speed of supply, effectiveness, on the basis of a trial planned for January-March 1998; the vendors considered will be chosen among the most important ones. These data will be compared and the performance indicators discussed. Some qualitative issues are also considered, i.e. the the electronic document delivery and the informative context.

On a more local point of view, the costs of an Italian medical library services will be analyzed: the Turin School of Medicine Central Library is running since 1990 a fee-based service of document delivery. The fees are based upon criteria fixed by the University Executive Board and the real cost of the services. The cost analysis is useful for Italian medical libraries (and specially for the GIDIF,RBM network) to consider their own costs and make comparison with the commercial providers; it is also important to evaluate how much is convenient to set up a local network for document delivery, and consider the cost of personnel and equipment.

Thursday 25 June Room D 10.30

Developing User Education Strategies for Supporting Evidence-based Nursing Practice: developments from the EVINCE project

Christine J. Urquhart, Rebecca Davies

University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK

 

The aims of the EVINCE (Establishing the Value of Information to Nursing Continuing Education) project (funded by the British Library Research and Innovation Centre between 1 November 1995-31 October 1996) were to:

1) establish the value of information to the development of nursing competence; and

2) to devise quality assurance guidelines for information services to nurses, midwives and health visitors.

The survey work included the value assessment, plus examination of the patterns of information need and use among a random sample of over 200 nursing professionals (including therefore users and 'non-users' of health information services). Around 13 different services were studied in the main phase (throughout England and Wales) and over 500 nurses contributed to the project.

The follow-up audit survey of the use profile of 16 different services indicated some common problems in the areas of user education, resourcing and electronic information services. The values of the funding organisations appeared to affect the way those problems were tackled. Nursing professionals need access to a wide range of information services and sources, and increasingly need to be expert users of electronic information sources, although use is limited at present. EVINCE found very low use of Internet sources, and a later Swansea survey (by Rebecca Davies) found that 50% of qualified nurses on post-basic courses did not use the CD-ROM or on-line catalogue.

The EVINCE findings showed how libraries could support evidence-based nursing practice. For example, the nursing professionals valued the information obtained highly, particularly when the information was obtained for course work. Working more closely with education providers should therefore enhance the impact of the library service. Interviews confirmed that nurses seek information which helps to improve practice outcomes - and the quality of life for the patient. Very often nurses appear to use formal sources together with informal sources to solve an 'information problem'. Around 50% of nursing professionals do appear to need help to answer their non-routine queries. Recommended user education strategies in EVINCE discuss how to take account of these needs. Electronic tools should be promoted on the basis of how they improve practice, and that is the focus of user education strategies now being developed by Rebecca Davies at University of Wales Swansea.

Thursday 25 June Room D 11.00

Information Seeking from the Work Place: a Study of Nurses Use of External Information

Olof Sundin, Harriet Berthold

Boras University College of Health Sciences, Boras, Sweden

 

The study is funded from the County Council of Alvsborg in the west of Sweden and is inter-linked with a European-wide telematic project called ACTION (Assisting Carers using Telematics Interventions to meet Older persons Needs). The need for evidence-based medicine within health care has been emphasised during the last years. Not so much discussed but no less important is the gap between the research and clinical work among paramedical professions like nursing. There is now a beginning awareness of the need for a closer relation to the nursing research and other knowledge resources in order to perform for example distance learning from the work place, clinical problem solving, re-search and development activities and patient education/information.

A point for departure for this paper is the necessity for a better understanding of the users attitudes towards research and other knowledge resources. After obtaining this knowledge it is possible to understand the users information behaviour and carry out a suc-cessful education in information seeking. Furthermore is the access to external informa-tion resources important.

The study is divided into four phases. The first phase includes a literature survey where the theoretical background taken from library and information science is out-lined. The second phase contains a questionnaire to study the needs for, and attitudes towards information seeking and use of research and other knowledge resources in clinical practice. The third phase includes user education and development of access to digital resources such as WWW and bibliographical databases through an Intranet service which will be supported by the ACTION project. The fourth phase will consist of self-reported semi-structured diary notes done by the respondents.

The method of the study features both qualitative and quantitative approaches.

This paper will focus on the results from the literature survey, questionnaire and the user education. The result from the first two phases creates a base for understanding, where the users behaviours and needs can be studied, in order to facilitate the empowerment of the users through education.

Friday 26 June Room A 9.00

Retraction of Articles from a Perspective of Peer-Review and Quality Control

Rétraction d'Articles dans une Perspective de Revue par des Pairs et de Contrôle de la Qualité.

Hampus Rabow, Ingegerd Rabow

Dept of Theory of Science and Research, Gothenburg University; Lund University Library UB2, Sweden

 

Bibliometric measures such as publication impact factor and total number of citations have in many scientific fields become principal means of evaluating scientific merit. Thus it has become important to study how the system of publication in peer reviewed journals suceeds or fails in maintaining standards of quality control. One particularly interesting indicator of these standards is the response to mistakes in the control system.

We have chosen to study articles that after publication were determined to have been based on false data or methodology and therefore officially retracted through a notice in the publishing journal. Our sample consists of all articles tagged as retracted in Medline 1988 - 1997. We used ISI's SCI (TM) to find all citations to these articles (both before and after the appearance of the retraction notice).

Because of the unavailability of reliable data on citation expectancy for different types of articles, we could not do a general comparison of the number of post-retraction citations with the normal case. Through a longitudinal study of the frequency of citations, we were still able to give a general estimate of the impact of retraction upon subsequent citation rates.

We also noted the number of articles published by an author post-retraction because retraction might influence later publication. A sample of articles citing retracted material was examined for what impact the citation had as support for the scientific argumentation. We checked whether high impact journals (JCR (TM)) differed from other journals both in the number of accepted and later retracted articles and in accepting articles citing retracted material. Retractions were found to be about 6 times as common in journals with high impact factors (*10) than in Medline average. We have found no obvious decline in number of publications after retraction. Especially remarkable is that many articles recieved and published after the appearance of a retraction notice contained positive and crucial citations of the retracted articles. The referee system in high impact factor journals, usually with high rejection rates, does not exclude acceptance of articles later being retracted. Neither does it act upon articles citing previously retracted material.The fact that retracted material is cited as support for scientific arguments has implications both for research (basic and applied) and for citation analysis as a measure of quality.

Friday 26 June Room A 9.30

Health Information in Action: Quality and Access in the new NHS

Information du Santé en Action: Qualité et Accès

Robert Gann, Sue Henshaw, Veronica Fraser

Centre for Health Information Quality, Winchester, UK

 

In December 1997 the new Labour government in the UK published its blueprint for the National Health Service The New NHS: Modern, Dependable. Central to the government’s vision is an emphasis on quality ("The new NHS will have quality at its heart") and on equitable access for all. This paper will examine the information implications of this new policy agenda and the ways in which library and information professionals are engaged with the strategy on a national and local basis.

A leading activity on the quality agenda is the Centre for Health Information Quality (directed by BG and managed by SH). The Centre is based at the consumer health information service, Help for Health, but forms a partnership with the Universities of Oxford, Southampton and London, so contributing academic, research and teaching expertise as well as direct involvement with patients. The Centre has been given the task of improving the ability of the NHS and other health care organisations to produce high quality, evidence based information for patients and health care consumers. The work of the Centre in developing quality criteria for health information, networking good practice and developing skills through training will be described.

Other developments set out in The New NHS include a revised national Information Management and Technology Strategy which will address "providing knowledge about health, illness and best treatment practice to the public through the Internet and emerging public access media"; the launch in 2000 of NHS Direct, a 24 hour nurse staffed national helpline; funding from the National Lottery for a network of local Healthy Living Centres; and development of a number of Health Action Zones where agencies will work together to tackle health inequalities.

Work begins in March 1998 to bring these various patient partnership, IT and telecommunications initiatives together into a single Public Information Strategy. As professional advisers to the NHS the authors (BG and VH) are active in developing this strategy nationally. On a local level we are looking forward to library and information services forming part of new Healthy Living Centres and developing multi-agency health information plans within the context of Health Action Zones.

Friday 26 June Room A 10.30

Remote Access to a Library and Information Resource for Primary Health Care Professionals

Accès à Distance à une Bibliothèque et aux Ressources d'Information pour les Praticiens

Andre Tomlin

Institute of Health Sciences Library, Oxford, UK

 

The aim of the Prise project (Primary Care Sharing the Evidence) is to monitor the effect of providing remote access to a library and information resource for all primary health care professionals, and to explore howfar the information needs of primary health care teams are satisfied by the service provided.

In the course of the project we have:

+ Set up of an electronic link providing access to a wide variety of resources including Medline, The Cochrane Library, Best Evidence and the Internet

+ Provided IT support for use of this link in connecting to the library resource

+ Provided a structured training programme based on the principles of CASPfew (Critical Appraisal Skills for Purchasers Finding the Evidence Workshops)

+ Provided library service support for project participants

+ Evaluated the information and ongoing training needs of the PHCT

The project which is managed by the Health Care Libraries Unit and supported by the Anglia and Oxford R&D Directorate, covers the four counties of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire. In all, 8 general practices and 4 general dental practices have been involved.

The computer links which have been set up have been complemented by on-site training for members of the practice and by telephone, fax and email advice and support. Because we believed that the delivery of information andtraining to the health professional should be as close to the place of practice as possible.

Preliminary findings clearly demonstrate the challenges and opportunities that exist for library and information service provision to a comparatively under-served group of health professionals. Library services play an important part in helping primary health care professionals deal with information overload. The project also seeks to inform the development of library services so that they may better meet the unique information requirements of this user group.

Friday 26 June Room A 11.00

Internet, Intranet and the Electronic Newsstand

Internet, Intranet et le Kiosque Électronique

Moreno Curti, A. Gelmetti, M. Rettani, C. Carrà, A. Gorini, G. Gabutti, A. Zeccato, C. Tinelli, C. Klersy

Direzione Scientifica - Policlinico S.Matteo, Pavia, Italy

 

Purpose of this study has been to show how, in a complex hospital setting, bibliographic information accessible on the Internet can be fitted into local activated services (Intranet).

The increasing availability on the Internet of bibliographic information that are, however, often limited to the bibliographic reference, with no free access to the full-text document, has brought us to the idea of combining both Internet and Intranet contribution. Actually, retrieving full-text documents from the Internet frequently depends on the economic possibilities of the single user. Intranet allows for everyone to check for journals at hand, to page through their indexes, and to fill in and send the request for a copy of the scientific paper of interest to the Scientific Documentation Service (SDS) of the Hospital.

In order to integrate the view from the Internet with that from the Intranet, the request form appears as a frame within the same web page, where the information retrieved from the outside web are displayed. In case a particular SDS periodical is not to be found on the Internet, the system allows to scan the indexes of each number of the available journal and to publish them on the Intranet; they will appear within web pages integrated with the request form. The SDS subsequently decides on the strategy for full text retrieval: from the subscribed periodicals; from full text journals accessible through a password; from national or international document delivery services.

In this way, an 'electronical newsstand' is set up, on which the single user may have a look, from its own computer, to the updated contents of its preferred journals; select the scientific papers of interest; fill in and send the request form for the full text document, which he will within short time receive on his desk, by means of the internal mail.

This service does in no way want to replace biomedical data-banks, but integrate them through a different modality of interrogating them. It will not answer the request of whom is searching bibliography by means of keywords. It rather will substitute the old-style newsstand display in the library, from which the user pages through the more recent issues, looks for new findings, chooses and then orders the articles to be read. Unlike the traditional newsstand display, the Electronic Newsstand may be consulted 24 hours a day and directly from one's own computer.

Le but de ce travail est de montrer comment l'information bibliographique accessible sur Internet peut être insérée dans les services activés localement d'Intranet, dans une réalité hospitalière complexe.

La disponibilité toujours plus grande sur Internet d'informations bibliographiques, qui sont toutefois souvent limitées à la simple référence bibliographique, sans accès libre au texte intégral, nous a ammenés à l'idée de combiner les apports d'Internet et d'Intranet. De fait, récupérer des documents intégraux sur Internet dépend souvent des possibilités économiques des usagers.

Intranet permet à chacun de contrôler les revues à disposition, de parcourir leur table des matières et de remplir et envoyer les formulaires de requête d'un article scientifique d'intérêt au Service de Documentation Scientifique (SDS) de l'Hôpital. Afin d'intégrer les images d'Internet avec celles d'Intranet, le formulaire apparaît en quadre sur la même page web que l'information récupérée à l'extérieur. Dans le cas où une revue du SDS n'aurait pas son correspondant sur Internet, le système permet de passer au scanner la table des matières de chaque numéro de la revue, afin de publier celle-ci sur Intranet. Elle apparaîtra à l'intérieur de pages web intégrées avec le formulaire de requête.

Le SDS décidera ensuite de la stratégie pour récupérer le texte intégral: à partir des revues scientifiques en abonnement, à partir de journaux à texte intégral accessibles par mot-clef, à travers les services nationaux et internationaux de récupération de documents.

Ainsi faisant un véritable kiosque électronique est mis en place, que l'usager peut consulter, à partir de son propre ordinateur, pour se mettre à jour sur le contenu de ses revues préférées, pour sélectionner les articles qui l'intéressent, pour remplir et envoyer le formulaire de requête de texte intégral. Il recevra celui-ci dans les plus brefs délais sur son bureau, à travers la poste intérieure.

Ce service ne veut aucunement remplacer les banques de données biomédicales, mais bien les intégrer par une modalité d'interrogation différente. Il ne répondra pas aux exigences de celui qui recherche une bibliographie par mots-clef. Plutôt il remplacera le kiosque "ancienne manière" de la bibliothèque, où l'utilisateur feuilletait les numéros les plus récents des revues scientifiques, recherchait les nouveautés, choisissait et comandait les articles à lire. Contrairement au kiosque traditionnel, le kiosque élecronique peut être consulté 24 heures sur 24, directement de son propre ordinateur.

Friday 26 June Room A 11.30

Les Avantages et les Menaces pour l'Organisation du Système d'Information dans le domaine Médico-Pharmaceutique à l'Époque des Nouvelles Technologies

Anna Maria Uryga

Université Jagiellonne de Cracovie, Bibliothèque Médicale, Krakow, Poland

 

La Bibliothèque Médicale de l'Université Jagiellonne est la plus ancienne des bibliothèques en ce domaine en Pologne. L'unité organisationellement indépendante des facultés de médecine et de pharmacie (Collegium Medicum) est l'élement constituant de la bibliothèque nationale dont les missions sont le service, la pédagogie et la recherche.

Depuis 1984, la Bibliothèque Médicale fonctionne dans un nouveau bâtiment, qui est éloignée de plus de 10-20 km du centre universitaire et du centre hospitalier universitaire. Le système d'information de notre bibliothèque, comprenant bibliothèque centrale comme un centre logistique et 70 unités associées dans le cadre du C.H.U., présente beaucoup d'éléments de dysfonctionnement. Notre bibliothèque est quand même un pôle documentaire principal en médecine de l'université tant pour les étudiants que pour les enseignants, les chercheurs et pour les professionels de la santé dans la région. En considérant la distance qui sépare la bibliothèque de la vie universitaire et hospitalière, on peut constater que ce modèle concret exprime un besoin de developper l'idée de la bibliothèque virtuelle et sans limite à l'avenir.

Les objectifs de la restructuration à atteindre à court et moyen terme sont les suivants:

- optimisation de l'accès à l'information par:

* L'accés à distance via la réseau de Campus aux catalogues de la bibliothèques et aux banques de      données la poursuite de l'effort de formation des utilisateurs à la recherche documentaire.

* La connexion par fibre optique aux réseaux nationaux (NASK) et internationaux (Internet).

* L'organisation des services d'information et de la documentation spécialisée.

- développement méthodique des collections et restructuration des activités par l'exploitation exacte des locaux (achèvement de l'extension) et leur modernisation doit être composée dans la logique du project d'automatisation de la Bibliothèque.

- intensification du rôle coordinateur du service commun de la documentation de l'université de Cracovie en domaine de la mèdecine, par une politique plus affirmée de coopération avec les autres structures documentaires;

- participation active au projet d'informatisation des bibliothèques piloté par le services interétablissements de coopération documentaire;

- mise en place d'un véritable système d'évaluation des services offerts par la Bibliothèque

Après deux ans de déroulement du projet de la restructuration du système des bibliothèques et d'information du Collegium Medicum de l'Université Jagiellonne, nous présenterons un premier bilan, indiquant les points positifs, les difficultés rencontrées et les prospectives. Le but de notre présentation n'est seulement de montrer cette situation concréte, où se trouve notre bibliothèque. Il s'agit également par une meilleure connaissance des conditions, de tous les dispositifs et moyens d'information, de développer la coopération en matière d'information entre les institutions polonaises et étrangères.

Friday 26 June Room B 10.30

How Virtual is Scientific Publishing?

Hans E. Roosendaal

Elsevier Science, Amsterdam, NL

 

This presentation gives an analysis of the transformation of the familiar scientific information value chain into a scientific communication value network. Developments in research and academia call for new ways of knowledge management which in turn has consequences for the scientific communication market.

The scientific communication market is described in terms of four forces representing the actors, content, accessibility and applicability, and their interplay. Scientific communication is described in terms of its four main functions: registration, awareness, certification and archive. These forces and functions allow to analyze the developments in the market and allow to discuss the transformation from paper-based system to communication in an electronic environment.

The developments in research are seen to further the already existing autonomous development of a 'unified archive', lead us to review certification policies to include elements external to research and lead us to consider new structures for communication and publications.

In particular, when we consider communication during research as well, the need to review the structure and organisation of the market becomes evident.

Friday 26 June Room B 11.00

Net-Knitting: the Library Paradigm and the New Environment

Derek Law, Tony McSean

King's College Londen and British Medical Association, London, UK

 

The access versus collection debate has been gaining in importance for at least 50 years. It is surfacing again in different clothing as we have enough experience of how the Internet does work to allow us to begin asking how it should work. In theory the Internet abolishes the concept of distance but with networks running at the speed of their slowest link the practical reality is much more complex. Libraries need to exploit interlocking Internet/Intranet environments, with metropolitan/regional networks entering the picture also.

The paper examines initiatives in Japan, the USA and Europe and puts forward the suggestion that the accepted function of a library is an almost perfect paradigm of the emerging shape of electronic scholarly communication.

The paper suggests a framework for decisions between local and remote acccess to information resources, new forms of library working to take account of library/ publishing/ computing convergence, and a shift in the place of librarians from the end of the information distribution process to the beginning.

Finally the paper suggests a timetable for the process by which experimentation in new forms of communication will become practical, paperless reality.

Friday 26 June Room B 11.30

Citation Analysis of the Veterinary Literature: a Tool to Understanding Changing Scientific Communication

Tom Roper

Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons Wellcome Library, London, UK

 

Citation analysis is a powerful bibliometric tool, but one infrequently applied to the veterinary literature: only one major study has been performed in recent years, and that confined itself to citation analysis as a tool for journal selection. There has been an increased interest in the area of animal health information, as the links between human and animal health have become the matter of public and media attention.

Using the resources of the RCVS Wellcome Library, one of the leading libraries for the profession, a citation analysis of two recent years (1995-96) of the core English language veterinary journals of interest to European practitioners was carried out in order to determine:

- the extent to which new media of scientific communication are changing the veterinary field

- the relationship between the veterinary literature and the wider biomedical literature

- the core journals and other media in the field

- the extent to which literature in languages other than English is cited

- the extent to which the major online biomedical indexing services cover this increasingly important field

The results have more than purely bibliometric significance, and show how the veterinary literature reflects the social and technological environment, as well as the development of science.

Friday 26 June Room B 12.00

Changing Users' Attitudes towards Information: an Italian Project on Invalid Biomedical Literature

Maria Nardelli, Mariateresa Azzolini, Gabriella Gabutti, Maura Moggia, Fulvia Sirocco

ZENECA S.P.A., ISF Pharmaceuticals, Policlinico San Matteo, Astra Farmaceutici, Azienda Ospedaliera "Ospedale San Martino", Milano, Italy

 

Invalid literature is undoubtedly a problem involving all scientific fields, but it becomes a more ethical and moral matter when related to the biomedical field. In fact recently was demonstrated that information retrieved to satisfy specific clinical questions can be used by physicians in future patient care decisions. Therefore one of the most important commitments for health information professionals should be to make users well aware of the existence of corrected or retracted articles. Both biomedical documentalists and librarians can play an important role in bringing published errata to users' attention, making them more critical readers and stimulating them to verify constantly the validity of the data contained in the literature they usually consult.

Despite the importance of this matter, health information professionals worldwide still can't refer to a codified method to help them reporting correctly invalid literature. With particular reference to librarians, usually they deal with the problem individually in many different ways, according to the organization of their libraries and the attitudes of their users. Even scientific publishers show corrected or retracted articles on their biomedical journals in many different ways, making often difficult for the end-users to retrieve this kind of information. It is slightly easier for health information professionals to have access to published errata consulting the most important biomedical databases, such as Medline or Embase, that report corrections or retractions through several appropriate keywords.

For all the above reasons, at the beginning of 1997 I gathered a small group of italian biomedical librarians interested in developing and starting a common experiment, devoted to identify a useful and functional method to keep users informed on invalid literature. In the project are involved two public libraries and two libraries of pharmaceutical industries, all members of the Italian Association of Health Information Professionals (GIDIF,RBM). The experiment provides a regular exchange of information among the group, the creation of a database for the retrieved errata, and individual interventions to awaken users' interest in the problem stimulating their critical attitude towards health information.

The collection of about 150 corrections or retractions since the beginning of the experiment seems to be a good result that stimulates us to keep on with the project. Now we would like to obtain the contribution and the suggestions of other italian and foreign colleagues, using different and perhaps more efficient methods to retrieve errata and to keep users informed about invalid literature.

Friday 26 June Room C 10.30

Quality Handbook - a Tool for Raising the Efficiency of Library Work

Grete Günther Bjørkenes

Østfold Sentralsykehus, Medisink Bibliotek, Frederikstad, Norway

 

Is our workplaces for the staff or for the users? This question was arisen in "Synopsis" no. 3/97,
(the journal of RBT) by Kirsten Engelstad.

There is no simple answer to that question. As she continued: a good, secure and stimulating workplace is important for the staff, but most workplaces are dependent on customers or a market. The staff of special libraries have become more and more engaged in orientating their activities towards good customer service.

For a long time the librarians were occupied with the internal library systems and co-operation between libraries. The users benefited of course of that efforts, but it was not until the libraries drew their attention to leadership, organization, customer handling, and marketing this become important.

The quality of the service has been more and more the question when librarians meet. In Norway this issue is also one of the main tasks for other organizations, for example the hospital that our library is a part of.

Securing quality and arise the service is what we have aimed at, all the time, but the new way to work, is to document what you do, do what you document and let the user know what they can expect of their libraries. In Norway some libraries have documented their work in special books, and use it as a tool to arise their quality in all fields.To increase the efficiency of the library, was the main goal for the librarians in Østfold Sentralsykehus to start the work with such a handbook, but we discovered soon that this led to better service for the users, better work environment for the staff, greater enthusiasm for the work, and last but not least, a more efficient library as a whole.

It was a great task to start and meant a good deal of work, and when the book was finished, we knew already then that this work will never be finished if you want a tool like this both in daily work, and also in the planning for the future. It has to be revised every year, at last, but the way we have done it, with great stress on the practical work around the procedures and also with mere manuals for special equipments, we realise already now, that we do not want to be without it.

Friday 26 June Room C 11.00

Total Quality Management in Dutch Medical Libraries: 1987-1998

Ronald van Dieën

Sophia Hospital, Medical Library, Zwolle, NL

 

In 1987 the Royal Dutch Society of Medicine (KNMG) in cooperation with the National Hospital Institute (NZi), presented guidelines for medical libraries in general hospitals. Due to the fact that this report was written by doctors instead of librarians, it lacked support by the medical librarians. Because there was no alternative, hospital directors accepted these guidelines and we, the medical librarians, had to work with it.

In 1990 the Librarians of Psychiatric Hospitals (BPZ) rewrote the report from a more practical point of view and updated it. Since then, many activities to improve the quality of medical libraries and medical librarians, found place. Committees on quality care, professional education, guidelines were installed. The last milestone was the acception of quality guidelines concerning medical libraries, in a total quality system for general hospitals called PACE. (PACE can be seen as the Dutch counterpart of the JHACO).

The library of the Sophia Hospital in Zwolle was the first medical library in the Netherlands to take part in a PACE survey and was awarded with a certificate.

Friday 26 June Room C 11.30

The Development of a Strategic Plan for the Scientific Information Provision of a Pharmaceutical Company

Nico W. van Putte

SDG InfoCentre, N.V. Organon, Oss, NL

 

Scientific information in the form of literature and patents is of essential value for an innovative pharmaceutical company like Organon. Such information plays a crucial role in the process of research and development (both in the laboratories and the clinic), in the registration procedure for new products and in the support of products on the market.Increasing competition in the pharmaceutical industry and rapid developments in the area of scientific information have made a pro-active approach with regard to the scientific information provision of a pharmaceutical company more and more desirable. Therefore Organon has developed a vision on the scientific information provision of the company for the near future and has laid down this vision in a strategic plan.

The plan describes the policy of the company with regard to the scientific information provision for the forthcoming five years and the consequences of this policy for the end-users, the information departments and some other departments involved, primarily for the headquarters in Oss in the Netherlands, but also for certain affiliates abroad. The plan is updated annually and is distributed to responsible managers in the organization after approval by the managing director. Implementation is mainly realized by means of operational plans of the information departments in Oss and abroad.

By means of the strategic plan one policy has been realized for the scientific information provision of the whole company. The plan has clarified the responsibilities of the end-users, the information departments and some other departments. Moreover, it stimulates the renovation of the scientific information provision which is vital to the future of the company.

Friday 26 June Room C 12.00

Expanding Information Service to Medical Staff and Students at small and remote Hospitals: a project at a University Library in Norway

Ragnhild E. Lande

University Library of Trondheim, Trondheim, Norway

 

In 1993 the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Trondheim was able to offer a complete undergraduate medical education to 60 students per year, after 18 years where only 3 1/2 years of clinical undergraduate medical education was offered. The new curriculum is based on problem-based learning (PBL). The preclinical and clinical part of the study are totally integrated during the 6 years of study. The number of new students per year was increased by 50% after 4 years, and it will be doubled within few years.

The clinical teaching is now spread over 8 hospitals in the middle part of Norway and, in addition, at the University Hospital. These hospitals are not a part of the University. The smallest of them have had problems in recruiting and keeping specialists in the medical and health science fields for some time. The specialists prefer to work in a professional and scientific environment in larger hospitals with better facilities. All the small hospitals have an inhouse data network but very few PC's with connection to the Internet. Half of them have a small one-person medical library.

There is a close relation between problem-based learning on the one hand and the library service on the other. It is also important for clinical practice to be able to retrieve relevant information and to be kept informed on the state of medical science. Therefore the University and the hospital authorities are planning a project which will start in the autumn of 1997. The aim is to make the Medical Library and Information Centre at the University into a power centre for these hospitals, so that the staff and the PBL students working there can have good access to information resources and find relevant literature for their daily work.

The paper will give an overview of the needs, the offers and the practical problems.

Friday 26 June Room D 10.30

Informational Infrastructure of a Public Health 'Library' of the (near) Future

Klaus Prätor

Landesinstitut für den öffentlichen Gesundheitsdienst, Bielefeld, Germany

 

The following considerations are based on experiences with the SOMED bibliographic database and library for public health maintained by the State Institute for Public Health NW, enriched by the results of two EU-supported studies on information systems within the fields of public health and environmental medicine. Of course a future library will extend its scope to different forms of electronic information. This will not be a merely technical change but also - and more important - a conceptual change. Technical means will trigger new forms of document organisation and document reference, as exemplified by hypertext and hypermedia, which combined with networking offer tremendous opportunities for information handling. These opportunities can only be exploited, if accompanied by an appropriate conceptual framework for integrating workplaces, network and information sources.

The suggested infrastructure is characterized by heavy use of meta-information, a new word covering as well traditional as recent concepts. Meta-information can roughly be classified as automatic vs. intellectual by the intended use by computers or human beings. To enable retrieval and handling of a multitude of documents as well as the orientation within them, different forms of meta-information are needed: mainly referential, structural and semantic one.

The reported solutions are not restricted to a conceptual level but cover also the level of software engineering. With integration of information as a main goal of meta-information the integration of meta-information itself forms an important topic in this respect.

Friday 26 June Room D 11.00

The Story of the Dutch Working Group for Automation and Centralization of Catalogues of Hospital Libraries: Learning from too much Success

Marjan van Wegen

St Lucas Andreas Hospital, Amsterdam, NL

 

In 1984, a number of small medical libraries initiated a project to reach a common goal: the automation of their work and centralisation of their catalogues. These libraries primarily wanted to join forces in order to improve efficiency and enhance the quality of their library services. This collaboration resulted in the creation of the Central Catalogue of Hospital Libraries (CCZ-system) which also is an integral part of the National Automated Catalogue System (NCC). These libraries not only enabled the CCZ-system financially. They also made a joint effort to create a common thesaurus of medical Dutch headings and to complete a Dutch translation of the National Library of Congress Classification. The project proved to be a huge success - in ten years' time over 60 hospital libraries have become participants in the CCZ-system which now contains 84,000 titles. But this success led to more activities than the CCZ-group could manage.

Years ago, this collaboration had started as just a working group within the Biomedical Section of the Dutch Medical Libraries Association (BMI). Over the years however, this working group has evolved into a more or less independent BMI-section that concerns itself with the many aspects of maintaining and improving a professional standard in medical library services. This ultimately resulted into biannual meetings focusing on subjects relevant to medical library work, such as: 'Working with electronic journals', 'Using the Internet', and 'Security measures in small hospital libraries'. These meetings are also open to employees of hospital libraries that do not actively feed titles into the CCZ-system.

The task of both maintaining and extending a thesaurus and a classification system, and organising biannual meetings for hospital libraries turns out to be unmanageable. This is why the CCZ-group will probably return to its initial task of creating and maintaining catalogues within the central catalogue of hospital libraries. The organisation of seminars will be delegated to the BMI. This also implies that hospital libraries cannot be part of the CCZ-system, unless they contribute to it.

The tradition of co-operation among libraries in The Netherlands has in the case of CCZ-group almost become too much of a success - it has certainly led to greater professionalism of a number of small (hospital) libraries, but at the same time this collaboration has become too large to manage. Therefore, it is vital that collaborations as these remain manageable and keep a clear order of priorities and also establish well-defined relations with similar collaborations.

Friday 26 June Room D 11.30

On the Role of Vernacular Medical Vocabularies in the Context of a Virtual Medical Library

Päivi Pekkarinen

National Library of Health Sciences, Helsinki, Finland

 

The paper explores the potential of vernacular medical vocabularies in the organization, structure and function of a virtual medical library. It is argued that they add to the awareness building and knowledge empowering of medical and health information users. For this purpose, a virtual medical library is defined as a computer-based, telecommunication-connected, domain-specific information system providing services as any conventional library does. Yet, its collection of documents, being continuously built and individually confugured by the user, expands beyond any single library collection. From the management point of view it may be seen as a cooperative of information professionals and information users; it is a continuous interactive process.

Regarded as a formal structure, a virtual /medical/ library contains documents, their relations and attributes attached to them.

Two types of documents may be distinguished by the data they contain

(1) documents as such, consisting of texts and images as well as multimedia

(2) metadocuments, consisting metadata used for the representation and retrieval of documents.

Documents produced by the information user may be considered as a microstructure; documents supported by the information professional may be considered as a macrostructure. The microstructure calls for the local, the macrostructure calls for the global. For the medical and health information user the virtual medical library is an opportunity to create meanings using his/her vernacular language, produce microstructures, and make them publicly accessible through macrostructures.

Two major domains manifested in the documents of the virtual library may be distinguished: expert knowledge domain and every day life domain. These lead to two requirements for the macrostructure of the virtual library: the capability to accommodate expert concepts and expressions (terminology) as well as popular concepts and expressions (terminology).

It is suggested that the primary tool for managing and maintaining the cooperative and interactive process of the virtual medical library is a user-interface-interlinked metathesaurus (cf. UMLS) linking a variety of vernacular medical vocabularies.