State of the Collections

The Biomedical and Medical Center Libraries (BML/MCL) spend over 2 million dollars each year to   provide you with a world-class online and print collection to support your research, teaching and clinical needs.  Access to these materials, especially the thousands of electronic journals, is a primary benefit of being affiliated with UCSD.  A snapshot of the collection only hints at the breadth and depth of the collection (see Figure 1).

The UCSD Libraries collection continues to be heavily used.  In 2007, the 50 most heavily used electronic journals funded by the Libraries had over 760,000 article downloads. Of these, 27 titles (54%) were biomedical in scope, and these accounted for over 476,000 (63%) of the downloads.

Surprisingly, the print collection usage is also increasing.  Last year, the BML/MCL Libraries recorded over 74,000 uses of the print collection in the library (measured by reshelving counts), circulated almost 36,000 books (a 12% increase over the previous year), and checked out 26,000 reserve books (a 41% increase over the previous year).

The Libraries face two significant challenges in maintaining the quality of the collection:

Money, Money, Money…

The biggest challenge is keeping up with the rising cost and escalating number of new scholarly journals.  Fortunately, this year we were able to add many new electronic journals, including: Breast Cancer Research, Cell Host & Microbe, Cell Stem Cell, Nature Clinical Practice Cardiovascular Medicine, Nature Clinical Practice Rheumatology, Nature Protocols, and 70 journals published by Karger.

Out of the 2 million dollars spent on our collection last year, about $1,760,000 (84%) went to provide what the Libraries call “continuations,” i.e., things we pay for every year such as electronic journals, online clinical resources like UpToDate and Clinical Pharmacology, and electronic books.  Only 16% of our budget went for things we buy once, primarily print books.  Since most of our collections budget is earmarked for continuations, we are especially vulnerable to yearly cost increases.  This year, we expect a 9% price increase across all of our continuations.  This means that we will need to spend over $158,000 more this year than last to provide the same collection.  On top of this loss of purchasing power, the UCSD Libraries expect a 4% budget cut this year.  This means little to no expansion of the collection will be possible, and cancellations may be necessary.  If the budget situation continues or worsens, the effect to the collections would be devastating.

Everything’s Online

The other challenge is countering the perception that a library is unnecessary now since “everything is online.”  The perception challenge is in some way caused by the Libraries successfully making our electronic resources seamlessly available.  Through the library’s extensive commitment of staff and technology resources, our library users can access the UCSD online collections almost entirely from their office, lab, clinic, or home.  Since many users no longer need to come into the physical library, and many of our electronic journals are searchable via Google, it is easy for people to lose sight of the fact that these are library-purchased and managed resources.  Said another way, it is not uncommon or surprising for researchers that use our online collection to say they “hardly ever use the library anymore,” when, in fact, they use it daily, as evidenced by the nearly 1.5 million electronic journal articles downloaded yearly.

What Can We Do?

What are we doing about these challenges?  First, we are thinking of ways to show our users that the money spent on the library is a good investment that benefits them directly.  For example, as a research institution, increasing our grant funding is core to the University’s future success.  We are investigating how the libraries and their extensive collections support and strengthen grant proposals and reports, and research articles — and ultimately, grant level funding, new research discoveries, patient care initiatives, etc.  Rather than relying on traditional usage statistics, we are looking for productivity and other output measures to show how what we do has a positive impact on UCSD.

What can you do to help?  As society members, journal editors, and authors, you can help the library make the case with publishers that we cannot survive these out-of-control price increases, and the spawning of endless specialty journals.  At this point, without additional funding, when the library is asked to fund new journals, we have to decide which journals to cancel in their place, while maintaining the integrity and quality of the collection.  Another way you can help is to reflect on how the libraries’ online resources have helped you to do your work better, and share your thoughts on this with us and the UCSD leadership.  Helping us prove that the libraries are core to the long-term success of UCSD will help make sure that the electronic journals and other resources you need are there for you in the future.

Please send any thoughts or comments you have about these issues to Jeff Williams, Head of Collections, Biomedical Library, at (858) 822-2218 or j12williams@ucsd.edu

SciVee launches new “PosterCast” feature

SciVee has launched a new feature that allows researchers to share the poster presentations they have created for meetings and conferences and add synchronized video and other commentary. “PosterCast” lets researchers leverage the effort they already put into creating posters and broadcast them online to a wider audience in a Web 2.0 online community environment. The Experimental Biology Conference is using PosterCast to provide a web presence for a traditional judged poster session. Read more about it at the press release here.

Integrative Medicine Webinars

Natural Standard is an international research collaboration that aggregates and synthesizes data on complementary and alternative therapies. It is provided to UCSD faculty, students and staff by the Biomedical Library. In addition to a comprehensive database, Natural Standard provides free webinars to keep clinicians up to date on alternative options for treatment:

Continue reading Integrative Medicine Webinars…

Carpet cleaning August 22nd - closing early

The Biomedical Library will be closing at 5 pm on Friday, August 22nd so that we can have the carpets cleaned. Didn’t we just do this? Yes, but they turned out to need a more industrial-strength cleaning so we’re having a little do-over.

Publisher class postponed

FYI, the MS Publisher class scheduled for 8/22 at the Biomedical Library is postponed and will be rescheduled at another time.

ScienceDirect + Safari combo having problems

There’s a problem happening with the Safari browser for Macs with the ScienceDirect e-journal platform, although there aren’t any specifics listed with ScienceDirect or with the California Digital Library’s helpline. ScienceDirect recommends Internet Explorer or Firefox and does not list Safari as a supported browser, although we know it has worked with ScienceDirect in the past.   Update: this issue may relate to updates to the ScienceDirect site that happened earlier in August, and if you had used it before, you may have lingering cookies or temporary files that are causing a problem. If you are experiencing problems, try clearing your browser cookies and cache.  You may also wish to move to a different browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox temporarily.

New PMID-PMCID Converter

As of May 25, 2008, NIH applications, proposals, and progress reports must include the PubMed Central ID number (PMCID) when citing a paper that falls under the NIH public access policy that is authored or co-authored by the investigator, or arose from the investigator’s NIH award.

You can get find individual PMCID numbers in PubMed but now the PMID-PMCID converter enables you to identify a bunch of PubMed ID numbers (PMID) and then automatically get their associated PMCID numbers all at once, as a batch process. Give it a try!

Vitamin D and Cancer Talk

Get ready for another timely and interesting talk in the UCSD Biomedical Library lunchtime seminar series. On September 26, 2008, Dr. Cedric F. Garland, a Professor from the UCSD Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, and member of the Moores Cancer Center, will present “Here Comes the Sun: Vitamin D for Preventing and Helping Cure Cancer” as part of the UCSD Biomedical Library lunchtime seminar series.

Dr. Garland will talk about recent advances in research on uses of vitamin D for prevention of breast and other types of cancer, and increasing the success of cancer treatment.

Dr. Garland is a Fellow of the American College of Epidemiology. He has a Doctor of Public Health degree from UCSD and studied epidemiology at Johns Hopkins.  His goal is to eradicate cancer.  He works closely on this goal with his colleagues, Drs. Frank Garland and Edward Gorham, and Sharif Mohr, M.P.H.  Dr. Garland is the author or coauthor of 150 abstracts, book chapters and research publications, mainly about breast and colon cancer and melanoma.  He and his coauthors have developed a novel cancer theory, the Devolution hypothesis, based mainly on their research on the role of vitamin D in reducing the risk of cancer and improving healthy survival of cancer patients.

Dr. Garland’s talk will be held in the Biomedical Library Events Room from 12-1 PM. Space is limited so please RSVP by September 24 to Vicky Anderson at vkanderson@ucsd.edu  Feel free to bring a discreet lunch; cookies and water will be provided.

The Clinical Blog: Publish With Care

A new study of medical blogs is available from the Journal of General Internal Medicine. [Link: PDF from SpringerLink, restricted to UCSD users and other subscribers] [Link: PubMed abstract] The authors analyzed the content of 271 medical and nursing blogs and identified numerous problems. In some cases, bloggers posted potentially personally identifiable information about patients. In other cases, bloggers who were easy to identify wrote negative comments about patients or their employers, which could potentially harm their professional reputations. So is it possible to express yourself without peril? The medical education blog Clinical Cases has a useful guide to maintaining patient privacy when writing about cases. An informal blogger group has also created the Healthcare Blogger Code of Ethics which has some good ideas about making sure your blog doesn’t come back to bite you.

AHRQ Patient Quality Handbook for Nurses

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has released a comprehensive handbook for nurses on patient safety and quality, Patient Safety and Quality: An Evidence-Based Handbook for Nurses.

The wide-ranging topics in this report include clinical reasoning, decisionmaking, and action; the evidence for evidence-based practice implementation; fall and injury prevention; reducing functional decline in hospitalized elderly; pediatric safety and quality; care models; nurse staffing and patient care quality and safety; work stress and burnout among nurses; nursing workload and patient safety; the impact of facility design on patient safety; handoffs - implications for nurses; wrong-site surgery; the effects of fatigue and sleepiness on nurse performance and patient safety; magnet environments for professional nursing practice — and many more.

Download the entire report, or PDFs of individual chapters, or, if you prefer, order a free print copy.