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Director’s Reflections ...All in a Year’s Work
Irecently completed the HSLS Annual Report for activities between July 2004 and June 2005. You can find it on our Web site at <www.hsls.pitt.edu/about>. Again, we have had a year with a wide variety of accomplishments and initiatives. Notable among these was the introduction of “E-Book Search,” which uses the search engine from Vivisimo, a Pittsburgh-based software company, to simultaneously search the full-text contents of textbooks from different publishers, and present the results in subject-based “clusters.” Elsewhere in this issue, you can learn how this technology can be used to search nearly 1,000 online bioinformatics resources on the HSLS Molecular Biology & Genetics Web site. During the year, HSLS licensed access to important new resources such as FIRSTConsult and Clinical Pharmacology from Gold Standard, as well as many new electronic journals. Librarians in each HSLS location – Falk Library, UPMC Shadyside, Children’s Hospital, and Western Psychiatric Institute - answered reference questions from diverse users, taught classes and workshops, and offered consultations on complex research issues. The busy Document Delivery department provided 50,000 copies of journal articles to libraries around the world – that’s nearly 200 articles every working day, in addition to articles photocopied for our own users! We also responded to unexpected challenges by turning lemons to lemonade: after a major water leak damaged Falk Library’s upper floor in August 2004, we transformed the affected area from a dreary enclave to a bright and comfortable study lounge. As part of that renovation, teams of staff members from Resource Management worked tirelessly for three weeks to shift the thousands of books on Falk Library’s upper floor into a more streamlined arrangement to make it easier for library users to find books they need. Our systems department works behind the scenes to maintain and upgrade dozens of servers, as well as public and staff computers, so that our resources and networks are available with virtually no downtime. The Computing and Media Center introduced wireless access in Falk Library, and purchased laptop computers and flash drives for users to borrow. Credit for all these accomplishments – the everyday work as well as the special projects – goes to the talented HSLS staff: they teach the classes and answer the questions, they license the e-resources and explain how to use them, they design the networks and fix the computers, they buy the books and catalog them, they check in the journals and put them on the shelves, they order the supplies and process the invoices, check out the books and answer the phone – day in and day out, all year long. Hats off and thank you! --Barbara Epstein, HSLS Director |
