ITM Library – Annual Report 2013

2013 started with a digital survey of our internal user community (ITM staff) consisting of 40 questions about knowledge, usage and appreciation of library services and resources. 84 colleagues responded and gave the library an overall rating of 87%.

Another survey consists of journal and database subscriptions. The 3 scientific departments listed their preferred current subscriptions, wished for new ones and possibly discardable titles. Inherently this was an interesting exercise but in practice it resulted in only a few changes because of imposed budget cuts.

At the start of 2013 we launched the Discovery Service (Ebsco) allowing us to combine all our digital resources (e-journals or collections, e-books, databases) on one search platform. The seamless integration of the full ITM Books catalog took some time but was realized successfully by the end of the year.

Starting in August the library website received a total make-over, with a fresh look and feel in a new 5 by 6 matrix structure, page-specific hotlinks and a website-wide search box. The new website was launched at the start of 2014.

Except for a few new e-journals such as Nature and Social Science and Medicine no new e-journals (collections) were acquired. As for e-books, we started subscribing to Ebsco’s Clinical Collection containing over 2,000 titles, all of them fully integrated in our Discovery Service. The number of new purchased print books declined with some 30%. A substantial number of gift materials were cataloged retrospectively and are now also included in ITM’s Books Catalog and Discovery Service.

The document delivery service was solicited more than in 2012. The number of internal document delivery requests (5,451) increased with some 12%, ITM requests for document orders from external providers (925) with 8.5%. External requests to ITM, mainly from Belgian universities, decreased with 32.5%.

The DGD Framework document requests (845) remained fairly stable. Our most active partners remain INHEM (Cuba), PUCE (Peru), CDS-INAS (Morocco), IPH (India) and this year also INRB (DRC). We received two trainees from Cuba (Maria del Carmen Hinojosa) and Ecuador (Cristian Saltos Basantes), each for a two week period.

The library’s home made Reference Manager databases now include over 100,000 records. Registering and analyzing the institute’s ever increasing published scientific output continues asking for a lot of the library’s time and efforts, with permanent updates of the  ITG Staff Publications database (15,114 records) and the TropMed Central Antwerp institutional open access repository (6,289 records) which received a major upgrade to the state-of-the-art DSpace 3.1 platform. Pure is another important research information platform on which we spent substantial time preparing the bibliographic component (over 11,000 records imported).

Dirk Schoonbaert

2013 in Numbers

* Individual e-books in the library catalog, excl. open access e-books from e.g. WHO or NCBI
** SpringerLink medical and biomedical collections 2005-2010 and Ebsco Clinical Collection