Research Library

David Lane, M.S., Director

During the last year the library continued rapid growth in an effort to keep pace with the expanding literature in psychiatry and related fields. The journal collection was enhanced with new titles in areas of current research and clinical interest. Foremost among these were Clinical Neuroscience Research, which is the publication of the Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease, Emotion, which provides a central forum for the disparate research on emotion, and The Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice, which is a unique publication investigating controversial and unorthodox claims regarding mental health interventions. The goal of this journal is to assist practitioners in sorting the wheat from the chaff when evaluating claims in areas such as psychotherapy and psychiatric diagnosis. Notable books acquired included Neuropsychopharmacology: The Fifth Generation of Progress, the latest edition in the Generation of Progress series. This edition details advances in both basic science and clinical application of recent research in psychopharmacology. Electronic access is a unique feature of the book, which should make it easier to find specific data among the massive amount of information contained within its pages. These new books and journals have added considerable breath and depth to the collection, and are in keeping with the library’s goal of acquiring the major clinical and basic research publications in the mental health field.

Collection development continued in the area of digitized publications. Through the efforts of library staff member Luis Minaya more than half the journal collection has been made available in electronic form. Employees with access to computer terminals at PI or the Columbia Medical Center can use the online journals through the library’s website. During the year an issue arose over the question of discontinuing printed journals when an electronic counterpart exists. A major obstacle concerns the library’s primary responsibility to guarantee archival access to journals. With electronic publications problems have occurred when a journal changes publishers (often the back issues of the journal are lost) and when publishers fail to provide access to back issues of an electronic journal if a current subscription is canceled. These and other problems must be resolved before the library can seriously consider canceling printed journals.

In another development related to electronic journals, the PI library has been selected by the National Library of Medicine to be part of a pilot field study investigating electronic document delivery services. The goal of the study is to test the capabilities and functionality of various types of electronic document delivery services, as well as to assess the impact of these services on library work processes and user/patron outcomes (satisfaction). The study will create a contrasting set of conditions to compare the impact of differing configurations of equipment, software tools and scanned document formats (PDF, TIFF, etc.) on various measures of service success, including reliability, speed, cost, ease of use, and user satisfaction. The library looks forward to participating in this study and has already identified several library clientele willing to participate in evaluating the speed and quality of the scanned documents. The documents will be transmitted from the New York Academy of Medicine Library, which has been selected as the PI Library’s partner library for this project.

Interlibrary loan services continued to grow. Thousands of loans were processed for borrowers from other institutions and from PI. In filling interlibrary loans the library relied on memberships in the two major cooperative organizations in the northeast region, the Medical Library Center of New York and the Northeast Regional Library Association. These clearinghouse organizations draw upon the vast resources of hundreds of scientific collections to obtain publications for their members. Using these networks, over 200 loans were obtained last year for readers unable to find material either here or in the Columbia Health Sciences Library. The library was also active filling loans for borrowers in other institutions. During the year over 9,000 loans, mostly in the form of photocopies, were sent to libraries unable to supply psychiatric books or journals from their own collections. Filling this extraordinarily high number of requests afforded the library an opportunity to share its unique resources and to improve scientific scholarship in the mental health field.