Home Page | Table of Contents | Previous Page | Next Page

Florida Medical Libraries Move into Cyberspace

Cathy L. Schell, MLS, MD/ afn30293@freenet.ufl.edu
Jacksonville Naval Air Station
Prudence J. Tucker, MS; P. Peggy Hsu, MS, AMLS; and Steven E. Flint, MSLS
University of Florida

Florida Family Physician
January 1996 / Volume 46 / Number 1

Libraries are Changing | Library Services | Library Initiatives | Summary

Libraries are Changing

 Medical libraries are changing to provide physicians with the best and fastest information services available. With the electronic revolution, more publishing will be in electronic form and less in paper. As a family physician and medical librarian, I see future bibliographies becoming more liquid and powerful with prospective indexing rather than retrospective indexing. Libraries in cyberspace have no walls, so medical librarians face demanding technological advancements to organize knowledge for physicians. Libraries have been a foundation of social, cultural, political, medical, and intellectual issues of freedom. Today librarians are coping with immense issues in trying to protect free and equal access to knowledge in this era of costly technology. Medical librarians are at the helm of steering physicians into a new era that may need to use chaos theory to organize knowledge in space. To bring you up-to-date on how Florida medical librarians at the University of Florida Health Science Center Library are facing these challenges, this article outlines:

Library Services

 Many services of the UF Health Science Center Library in Gainesville are available to health care professionals throughout the state of Florida. Practitioners can call the Information Desk at (904) 392-3585 during weekday business hours or send e-mail requests for information to reference@library.health.ufl.edu. (Please include your name and telephone number if you do send an e-mail request). The HSC Library can be accessed through the Florida Health Information Network (FHIN), a membership program that entitles subscribers to the same services as UF Health Science Center faculty. Members who pay the FHIN annual fee have 25 hours per year of dial-in access to the medical literature databases on the FHIN network (AIDSLINE, MEDLINE, TOXLINE, etc.) and borrowing privileges. In addition, they receive discounted pricing on librarian-conducted literature searches and document delivery, and are able to dial in to LUIS, the catalog of the state university system that includes additional specialized literature indexes. For more information about FHIN membership, please call the Library at (904) 392-4016.

The HSC Library and FHIN support the information needs of Area Health Education Center (AHEC) affiliates in the northern counties of Florida. The regional AHEC offices transmit requests for services to the Library. For those not affiliated with the Library through FHIN or AHEC, computer search services and document delivery are available on an individual basis. There are several ways to request a literature search by a reference librarian:

Library Initiatives

 Costs of medical information materials are escalating rapidly and budgets rarely keep pace. This year the Health Science Center Library will have a significant reduction in the number of its journal subscriptions. In response to this, the Library is using electronic methods for obtaining the text of articles we do not own. One method is ARIEL, a program that uses the Internet to transmit scanned images of text and illustrations from one library to another. Another method is to use vendors such as CARL Uncover. For a fee, CARL UnCover and others will fax the text of articles to libraries (or to individuals using credit cards). As more library patrons connect to the Internet and other online services, librarians find that their teaching role is expanding. We offer instruction on effective search techniques to enhance access to medical literature databases and to the Internet.

The HSC Library continues to work with the University of Florida College of Medicine Curriculum Committee and to offer training to residents to enhance the information-seeking skills of future practitioners and promote the life-long learning process. The Library staff is now hard at work on the development of a World Wide Web Home Page at http://www.library.health.ufl.edu. We are posting information about our services and our collection so people will know the ways we can assist them. There will also be links that directly connect users to Internet health information resources in a variety of fields. Anyone with an Internet connection and WWW browser software will be able to use the HSC Library's Home Page as a starting place for navigating the 'Net. Library collections are no longer solely books and journals. We have an active electronic collection committee evaluating products that go well beyond traditional bibliographic citation databases. Full text journals and patient education sources are among those we are considering for addition to FHIN.

Summary

In summary we have presented a sketch of how one of the major medical libraries in Florida is moving into cyberspace. The University of Florida health science librarians are constantly enhancing the skills they offer to support patient care decisions through continuing education and professional development activities along with the skills required in accessing electronic information for patients and physicians. Now that the Library of the Foundation of the Academy of Family Physicians has closed its doors, I hope we have provided you with a few alternatives for accessing the medical literature. As the space age of electronic information takes off, medical librarians at the University of Florida are meeting challenges of a new age to serve Florida physicians.
Edited on January 3, 1996 / Updated on January 3, 1996
Copyright 1995 by the Florida Academy of Family Physicians, Used by Permission
Location: http://www.med.ufl.edu/medinfo/ffp/library.html
Contact: Richard Rathe, MD / rrathe@ufl.edu
Home Page | Table of Contents | Previous Page | Next Page