Some of the reasons might be that health/medical libraries are well enough resourced that they can purchase all the main products they need to satisfy their users’ needs, or conversely, they could be under-funded to the extent that they have no discretionary budget for electronic subscriptions; another reason could be that the ERA products are not attractive to health libraries. (But consider the idea that some of the non-health products they may be of interest as ‘optional extras’ in addition to core health/medical databases, for example business or legal databases.) And it could be the case that health libraries have alternative avenues for cooperative purchasing so they have not felt a need to belong to ERA.
All these reasons may all be true to a greater or lesser extent, but I believe that the latter is probably a strong factor, as there are, in most states/territories, cooperative purchasing arrangements across the jurisdictions’ hospital/departmental libraries, and these generally focus on core products of wide general appeal. The down-side is that health libraries may be missing out on some potentially appealing products for our health professional clients. Also, we don’t have an opportunity to suggest new products which could enhance our general reference collections or other non-health specialist areas.
Even though many libraries don’t have much flexibility in their budgets, we are probably collectively, missing out on some powerful information sharing opportunities and the chance to generate increased purchasing power which could be gained in a national consortium approach (see the fifth dot point on the ERA promotional brochure) and would help to make our budgets go a bit further. In addition to this economic rationale, and perhaps more strategically, I believe that ERA is a working model which could provide a practical starting point for a national library for health (an idea which is gaining some traction on the national scene). We need to be driving the agenda on this, rather than tagging along in the wake of other eHealth ICT initiatives.
By Ann Ritchie, ERA Executive Committee, Special Libraries representative
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3 comments:
Most libraries in the health sector are part of a larger body e.g. hospital libraries which are resourced both through health departments and/or universities (for teaching hospitals), drug company libraries etc.and already have access to a large number of electronic resources. Those of us outside these nets are very small, mainly OPALs, with extremely limited budgets - the loss of ILANET from the State Library of NSW as a pay-as-you-go service hit many very small libraries very hard. I would need to drop journal subscriptions to fund electronic resources as they are currently structured and that would be a very hard sell. This library serves a research unit so that access to back runs of titles are very important
I agree with Ann's reasons for the poor take-up by the health sector. The emphasis on consumer health in databases currently listed make it of little use to many of us.
Joy Fischer
National Acoustic Laboratories Library
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