ITM Library – Annual Report 2020

During 2020 the ITM library saw its largest physical reorganization in over 3 decades. The floor space was reduced by 40%, evacuating the former journals reading room on the third floor housing some 1000 m of bound periodicals. 500 m was moved to the central reading room on the fourth floor, 250 m could be stored in other locations in the ITM buildings, incl. the Karibu archives, and 250 m was sent permanently to the waste paper containers. Yet care was taken that no essential or/and unique collections were discarded and also the books – partly relocated in the front part of the reading room, partly in our closed compact storage – were left unharmed. Ever looking at the bright side of life, I am happy to admit that the dreaded nightmare could have been much worse.

Library staff currently consists of 35-year veteran librarian Dirk Schoonbaert and freshly starting library assistant Nic Peeters, both operating on a 80% schedule, so VTE now totals 1.6. During summer we got substantial  administrative help of 2 jobstudents to successfully mitigate arrears in our various databases, and 3 additional jobstudents for the physical relocation of journal collections. Fortunately we were able to keep the library open and functioning during most of the paralyzing Covid-19 crisis, just inserting a handful of extra closing days in December.

As for E-content our biomedical literature resources remained at the same level, with thousands of E-books and E-journals and dozens of bibliographic databases, all integrated seamlessly in our ever improving EDS Discovery Service. TropMed Central Antwerp received another major update adding over 500 recent bibliographic records featuring full-text PDFs. PURE research outputs were kept up-to-date on a weekly basis.

Dirk Schoonbaert

2020 in Numbers

* Individual e-books in the library catalog, excl. open access e-books from e.g. WHO or NCBI
** E.g. Ebsco Clinical Collection and several free internet platforms