Kudos to you for your efforts in this area. I am the Library Technician at Samaritan Medical Center in Watertown, New York, one hour north of Syracuse. Your Blog seems to have caught the eye of quite a few people and one of them was my supervisor Jeff Garvey, Director of Library Services. We are the headquarters for the Hospital Library Program of the Northern New York Library Network (formerly 3Rs Council) and provide library services for most hospitals in Jefferson, Lewis, Oswego and St. Lawrence Counties. Hunter-Rice Health Sciences Library is small in size physically, but our reach electronically keeps the medical professionals and students we serve well armed with the latest information.

Like many medical libraries, an increasingly critical method of keeping doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, and students informed is through our web site at http://www.samaritanhealth.com/library.htm. The library’s web site is becoming a “central hub” of information dissemination and a vehicle for requesting library services and items. For example, last year we took over the Video Program from United Iroquois Shared Services and patrons can now browse the catalog online and order directly from the web site. We also have our Literature Alerts (known as CLUEs or Clinical Literature UdateEs) online for 3 months.

I suppose larger medical libraries do not have the resources to provide paper copies of literature alerts to their patrons anymore, but we still do. Although we also provide electronic delivery of literature alerts and TOCs, that form of delivery accounts for less than 5 percent of the total. Despite our best efforts to promote electronic delivery, the number of patrons choosing that delivery method has actually fallen substantially in recent years. Your observations about email overload on physicians’ desktops are apropos. And the problem of computer technophobes in the medical field is a long way from resolving itself.

Yet your efforts have opened a lot of eyes about the possibilities of setting up RSS feeds directly for end users, resulting in encouraging greater investigation of and participation in electronic delivery on the part of the patron. I will be following your Blog with great interest and hope to contact you directly in the future.

Mike Chartrand
Library Technician
Hunter-Rice Health Sciences Library
Samaritan Medical Center

Medline indexes all the clinical journals, and you can generate custom RSS feeds from PubMed (or HubMed)- so we don’t have to be stopped by the failure of publishers to offer RSS feeds. Also, the feeds provided by publishers often don’t include an abstract, never contain the unique PubMed ID, and couldn’t be used to help your patrons use your institution’s PubMed linkouts. For this reason, I think the PubMed RSS feeds are actually preferable to those created by the publishers.

I’ll also post a long item in the next couple of days on how to CREATE an RSS for for a page that doesn’t have one. Stay tuned.

Thanks so much for your comment!

-David