Director's Reflections...Holding on to Our History
“…the business of a library is to have the right things to put in the right hands at the right time, without ever knowing precisely what the right thing is, whom the right hands belong to and when the right time is…Librarians…acquire loads of books, journals, pamphlets and other publications that are potentially useful without really knowing when someone will need them.”
The words above, written by David M. Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in his Sunday column on January 7, 2007 <www.post-gazette.com/pg/07007/751617-372.stm>, describe perfectly the dilemma of collection management in any library. In a medical library, particularly, we want our entire collection to be immediately available to any user, any time. But we wrestle with the finite limitations of shelf space and closing hours. Our printed books and journals become old and brittle, and must be shifted to make room for new acquisitions. When we sent our books on smallpox and anthrax to storage in 1985, who could have known that these textbooks, written in the 1940’s and 50’s, would be consulted again in the aftermath of 9/11?
The shift from print to electronic versions of books and journals solved this problem, at least for the newest information. Our digital shelf space is unlimited, and the digital library is open 24/7. As one of our physician users happily observed: “Now I can look up articles from the library in my pajamas at 2 AM, in front of my fireplace.”
We are still working on the challenge of providing ubiquitous access to older and classic materials. This month, HSLS added two new electronic resources: The Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (LWW) Journal Legacy Archive, and the Psychiatry Legacy Collection.
The LWW Archive includes electronic back files of 220 medical, nursing and healthcare journals. As the publisher notes, “That’s equal to more than one mile of library shelf space!” Archive coverage for each journal begins with its first issue, some dating back to the 19th century. The oldest in the collection, The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, was first published in November 1827.
The Psychiatry Legacy Collection, published by American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc., covers 162 years of psychiatry through six major peer-reviewed psychiatry journals. The collection dates back to 1844, and includes The American Journal of Psychiatry, the oldest continuously published medical specialty journal in the United States. Other titles are Academic Psychiatry, Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research, Psychosomatics, and Psychiatric Services (formerly Hospital & Community Psychiatry).
If HSLS owns the print editions of titles in either of these collections, we will continue to house them in our storage facility. We will also continue to expand our electronic holdings of older resources.
--Barbara Epstein bepstein@pitt.edu
