ITM Library Newsletter January 2020

The ITM library has recently had a major physical makeover: the remaining current printed journals were moved to the photocopy room and have made spacious room for ITM’s new computer room housing 16 PC’s for the use of students and visitors and occasionally group tutorials. Later this year the library floor space will shrink substantially: most of the 30,000 periodicals volumes on the third floor will be moved to a location outside ITM to make room for new offices for academic support staff. Availability of this generally older literature will remain guaranteed, but obviously no longer on immediate access basis. The books collection on the upper floor will remain unaffected.

In 2020 the ITM library continues to offer you more of the same, i.e. access to the same biomedical literature resources as in previous years, but with ever increasing numbers of e-journals and e-books, most of which are fully integrated into one platform: Ebsco Discovery Service (EDS). EDS includes a number of major databases and collections such as Medline Complete, (a large part of) Science Direct, CABI Global Health, DOAJ, OpenAIRE and Ebsco Clinical Collection e-books. EDS also integrates a number of self-produced ITM library databases:

• Full catalog of 30,000 library (e-)books, incl. links to over 4,000 digitally available items. Here you can also discover our new acquisitions list of recently available books.
• Full database of over 17,000 ITM researchers’ publications;
• Complete database of 3000 ITM students’ master theses, all with digital full-text);
• The full collection of the Annales de la Société Belge de Médecine Tropicale, ITM’s historical publications flagship from 1920-1995, all 4,400 records with open access PDF links;
• Comprehensive database of over 7,000 Ebola and Marburg virus literature;
• Selection of over 10,000 records on endemic disease control in developing countries;
• Selection of over 10,000 records on health care organization in developing countries;
• Selection of 8,000 records on library and information science focusing on topics such as biomedical literature, authorship, systematic reviews methodology, peer review, bibliometrics, library management, … );

This ITM Library Collections subset is updated monthly. Use the set of limiters in the left margin of the results screen to focus your research. Remember that default sorting is by ‘relevance ranking’ but that you can easily switch to (inverse) chronological order. Most – but not all – post-year 2000 items will link to full-text PDFs.

Other useful EDS features include:

• EDS offers you comfortable access to full text access when available. Downloadable PDFs are optimized by the large coverage of MedLine Complete. Another option is the UnPayWall link offering access to tens of millions of open access articles.
• EDS contains PlumX indications for analyzing impact in social media.
• EDS is fully integrated with BrowZine, offering you the opportunity to browse to the full issue in which a retrieved article is published.
• EDS is specially adapted for viewing on mobile media.

This January Nic Peeters joined us as permanent library assistant taking care of first-line user services such as fast and accurate document delivery (contact docdel@itg.be or tel.244). Together with the librarian (bib@itg.be or tel.240) in the back office, staff is currently at 1.6 FTE.

Dirk Schoonbaert