PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

James Shedlock

Publications and source records attributed to James Shedlock.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

Developing a virtual community for health sciences library book selection: Doody's Core Titles.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this article is to describe Doody's Core Titles in the Health Sciences as a new selection guide and a virtual community based on an effective use of online systems and to describe its potential impact on library collection development. SETTING/PARTICIPANTS/RESOURCES: The setting is the availability of health sciences selection guides. Participants include Doody Enterprise staff, Doody's Library Board of Advisors, content specialists, and library selectors. Resources include the online system used to create Doody's Core Titles along with references to complementary databases. BRIEF DESCRIPTION: Doody's Core Titles is described and discussed in relation to the literature of selection guides, especially in comparison to the Brandon/Hill selected lists that were published from 1965 to 2003. Doody's Core Titles seeks to fill the vacuum created when the Brandon/Hill lists ceased publication. Doody's Core Titles is a unique selection guide based on its method of creating an online community of experts to identify and score a core list of titles in 119 health sciences specialties and disciplines. RESULTS/OUTCOME: The result is a new selection guide, now available annually, that will aid health sciences librarians in identifying core titles for local collections. EVALUATION METHOD: Doody's Core Titles organizes the evaluation of core titles that are identified and recommended by content specialists associated with Doody's Book Review Service and library selectors. A scoring mechanism is used to create the selection of core titles, similar to the star rating system employed in other Doody Enterprise products and services.

Book Selection↗

The Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries Annual Statistics: an exploratory twenty-five-year trend analysis.

This paper presents an exploratory trend analysis of the statistics published over the past twenty-four editions of the Annual Statistics of Medical School Libraries in the United States and Canada. The analysis focuses on the small subset of nineteen consistently collected data variables (out of 656 variables collected during the history of the survey) to provide a general picture of the growth and changing dimensions of services and resources provided by academic health sciences libraries over those two and one-half decades. The paper also analyzes survey response patterns for U.S. and Canadian medical school libraries, as well as osteopathic medical school libraries surveyed since 1987. The trends show steady, but not dramatic, increases in annual means for total volumes collected, expenditures for staff, collections and other operating costs, personnel numbers and salaries, interlibrary lending and borrowing, reference questions, and service hours. However, when controlled for inflation, most categories of expenditure have just managed to stay level. The exceptions have been expenditures for staff development and travel and for collections, which have both outpaced inflation. The fill rate for interlibrary lending requests has remained steady at about 75%, but the mean ratio of items lent to items borrowed has decreased by nearly 50%.

Annual Reports as Topic↗

The Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries Annual Statistics: a thematic history.

The Annual Statistics of Medical School Libraries in the United States and Canada (Annual Statistics) is the most recognizable achievement of the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries in its history to date. This article gives a thematic history of the Annual Statistics, emphasizing the leadership role of editors and Editorial Boards, the need for cooperation and membership support to produce comparable data useful for everyday management of academic medical center libraries and the use of technology as a tool for data gathering and publication. The Annual Statistics' origin is recalled, and survey features and content are related to the overall themes. The success of the Annual Statistics is evident in the leadership skills of the first editor, Richard Lyders, executive director of the Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center Library. The history shows the development of a survey instrument that strives to produce reliable and valid data for a diverse group of libraries while reflecting the many complex changes in the library environment. The future of the Annual Statistics is assured by the anticipated changes facing academic health sciences libraries, namely the need to reflect the transition from a physical environment to an electronic operation.

Annual Reports as Topic↗

Evaluating the Health SmartLibrary.

The Health SmartLibrary (HSL), supported by the National Library of Medicine (Information Systems grant # 1 G08 LM07051-01A1), is a web-based system designed to target resources relevant to the users' information needs. Faculty and librarians collaborated to build tools that would make access to information resources easy and efficient. These tools include current awareness; a metasearch engine; a file cabinet; personalization features; and discipline-based resource collections.

Humans↗