ITM Library – Annual Report 2021

After 2020’s physical reorganization, this year the library received a new place in ITM’s organogram. The library moved from the former support services group to the central policy group where it is now integrated within the Research Office. As for daily practice, 2021 proved not to be a very dynamic year, with fewer physical visitors than before – partially due to the continuing Covid-19 pandemic measures – with mostly e-mail contacts, some teleworking and a number of Zoom/Teams meetings. Yet with a 1.6 FTE staff we were able to keep regular library opening hours without a single unforeseen closing day. One job student helped us to keep institutional publication record up-to-date within the Pure platform on the basis of some 25 working days spread over the year.

2021’s biggest challenge proved to be of a financial nature. As most subscriptions and licenses need to be paid beforehand, at the start of the year the library’s 2021 acquisitions budget was already largely ‘spent’. Then in spring it was unexpectedly cut with over 20%. Inevitably part of this reduced budget needed to be restored to be able to pay for already existing contracts. This partial restoration combined with reducing individual book purchases and postponing a number of activities, like journal binding and cancelling some irregular subscriptions we managed to spend substantially less than the initially accorded acquisitions budget. As such our (mostly prepaid) biomedical literature resources were kept more or less 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.

Dirk Schoonbaert

2021 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