Development of Library Collections

The Research & Library Assistant, academic faculty, researchers (students and faculty), President, and Executive Vice President, and Assistant Program Administrator are requested to evaluate the LRC regularly. This evaluation contains a request to review the holdings of the LRC and to offer suggestions for additions. Publications in anesthesia and anesthesiology are evaluated for potential purchase, on the basis of cost, cost-benefit ratio, and potential use in MTSA’s program.

Some potential purchases are identified by announcements of monographs and journals to the Research & Library Assistant by virtue of her presence on library mailing lists, and to the Executive Vice President and Assistant Program Administrator by virtue of their presence on CRNA mailing lists. Other titles to be considered for purchase are submitted by faculty members and are almost always ordered. Student requests are given serious consideration, and if they are not honored, the requesting student is informed of the reason why.

If a monograph already in the collection is updated by a new edition, that new edition is almost always purchased. (If the older edition is reference, it is relegated to circulation, and the newer edition is made reference only. A notice is placed on the older, now circulating, edition that it has been updated by a volume available in reference. If the older edition is in circulation, it is offered to students or discarded once the new edition is in place.) If a monograph were to be updated by a new edition that MTSA opted not to purchase, discarding the edition we owned would be seriously considered.

Indexing in the National Library of Medicine’s MEDLINE is a major criterion for evaluating new anesthesia journal titles. While it is acknowledged that a reasonable cost for a medical journal is likely to be higher than for a non-technical one, cost is a factor in the decision. While no exact figure can be given as a definition of “reasonable”, consideration is given to frequency, size, and content, and the reputation of the publisher.

The Research & Library Assistant ensures that the Learning Resource Center maintains reciprocal lending agreements with other libraries to supplement any gaps in the collection. These agreements include FreeShare, a cross-regional library group for National Library of Medicine (NLM) libraries that would like to participate in free, reciprocal lending. To join, libraries must report serial holdings in NLM’s DOCLINE and agree to exchange free interlibrary loans with other participants. The Librarian also belongs to Tennessee Health Sciences Library Association (THeSLA), a statewide library resource sharing group whose members participate in free reciprocal lending practices. The MTSA Research & Library Assistant is a member of Association of Seventh-day Adventist Librarians (ASDAL), whose primary focus is electronic content licensing, and consists of 17 private academic libraries from three countries.

An additional consideration is available library space; and for this reason, frivolous purchases are unlikely. Non-anesthesia and non-medical materials are evaluated for basic reference value, and appropriate general interest.