Strengths of the periodic publication collections of four hospital libraries: analysis of the Document Delivery Service.
Absctract:The collection development has the main objective of satisfying the community needs by creating base and strengthened collections on the long range, which complement other resources outside the Library. Nowadays, electronic formats and consortial buying have made it easier to access to more information and services and have also homogenized the collections due to the unified buying of the serial packages. We have also assisted to dramatic changes in the users’ habits in the sense they look up an ever more abundant and multidisciplinary information, a fact that we can attribute, at least partially, to an easier access to the bibliographic funds, despite in some cases only as a bibliographic reference. To gather all the information the users demand we must make a strategic planning at least in two perspectives: the development of a basic good quality collection for our own users and also the development of an attractive and necessary collection for the whole libraries community.
The general objective of the present study is to find out which are the strengths of our serial collections for external libraries, both in the sense of the titles and subjects that other libraries request and of the temporal period of reference. To achieve this, we have analyzed the document supply requests performed by external users in four hospital Libraries in Madrid (Spain). These data will give us information about the external strengths of our collections, both for our own consortium and for the other libraries.
Knowing the strengths of our collections can help us to maintain a cost balance between the resources supplied and requested from our Library through the Document Delivery Service; besides, it can lead to a cost reduction due to the optimization of the utilization of the existing resources with satisfaction of a high proportion of the total demand. Policies for the development of library collections and of the Document Delivery Service should be coordinated in order to achieve a delicate balance between resources that can be acquired in property and those that can be easily and cheaply accessed. All the libraries included in the consortium must assume and implement these policies, both for the development of their own collections and for the interlibrary loans. This strategic policy can lead to an increase of the collections and also to an expansion of the interlibrary agreements that allow diversification of these collections
