acquisitions for academic medical and health sciences librarians

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Acquisitions for AcademicMedical and Health SciencesLibrariansSusan Suess aa School of Osteopathic Medicine , Pikeville College ,147 Sycamore Street, Pikeville, KY, 41501, USAPublished online: 20 Jan 2009.

To cite this article: Susan Suess (2004) Acquisitions for Academic Medical and HealthSciences Librarians, The Acquisitions Librarian, 16:31-32, 101-109

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Acquisitions for Academic Medicaland Health Sciences Librarians

Susan Suess

SUMMARY. Developing a library collection is one of the most importantpursuits in medical librarianship. A library’s collection is its foundation, andthe collection is the central information resource upon which most libraryactivities rely. Today’s vision of the medical or health sciences collectionmust incorporate a broader range of materials, especially those in electronicand other nonbook formats. The increasing availability of information inelectronic formats presents a new collection development challenge to li-brarians. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Deliv-ery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <docdelivery@haworthpress.com>Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com> © 2004 by The Haworth Press, Inc. Allrights reserved.]

KEYWORDS. Acquisitions, collection development, health sciences li-braries, medical libraries, book selection

INTRODUCTION

Developing a library collection is one of the most important, if not the mostimportant, of pursuits in medical librarianship. A medical library’s collection

Susan Suess is Medical School Librarian, School of Osteopathic Medicine,Pikeville College, 147 Sycamore Street, Pikeville, KY 41501 (E-mail: ssuess@pc.edu).

[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: “Acquisitions for Academic Medical and Health Sciences Librarians.”Suess, Susan. Co-published simultaneously in The Acquisitions Librarian (The Haworth Information Press,an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc.) No. 31/32, 2004, pp. 101-109; and: Selecting Materials for LibraryCollections (ed: Audrey Fenner) The Haworth Information Press, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc.,2004, pp. 101-109. Single or multiple copies of this article are available for a fee from The Haworth DocumentDelivery Service [1-800-HAWORTH, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. (EST). E-mail address: docdelivery@haworthpress.com].

10.1300/J101v16n31_09 101

is its foundation, and the collection is the central information resource uponwhich most library activities rely. And no library, especially a medical orhealth sciences library, can exist without constantly renewing its resources.This is the entire basis for acquisitions and collection development.

The traditional concept of a library is one of a collection of books and peri-odicals with circulation and reference services. The acquisition of monographsis one of the oldest functions in libraries. Indeed, until the beginning of scien-tific journals in the 17th century, a collection of monographs was the sine quanon of a library (Funk, 1996). Without the ordering and receipt of books, therewas no library, and thus no need for cataloguing, reference, or any other ser-vices. Today’s vision of the collection must incorporate a broader range of ma-terials, especially those in electronic and other nonbook formats, and a greatersense of connectivity to include access to resources external to the library.

Just as the library’s mission, objectives and goals should reflect those of itsparent institution, library acquisitions should also reflect the character of theinstitution. The scope of acquisitions should parallel the extent of the institu-tional commitment to various activities and disciplines both internally and ex-ternally. A library’s collections should be developed in a manner consistentwith its overall goals, and collection development implies not only the selec-tion of specific materials but also a master plan–a vision of how the library, re-sponding to its unique set of circumstances and responsibilities, will build itscollections and make the wisest use of its resources. Ultimately a medical li-brary’s collection in the aggregate is a selection from the vast universe of in-formation in the medical and health sciences literature.

Selectors should know their institution and its internal and external interests,must understand the library’s clientele and these clients’ specific demands forinformation, and have knowledge of the collection, subject, and users. It makes adifference whether the institution serves high profile, intense research programs,has established centers of excellence in specific clinical or research areas, hasspecialized training programs with unique information requirements such ashospital, residency and fellowship programs, or has large-scale training grants.

Library budgets are becoming more restrictive at the same time as the out-put from the publishing industry is escalating exponentially, making selectionmore complex. Expenditures for the acquisitions of books, journals and audio-visual materials are exceeded in most library budgets only by personnel expen-ditures (Richards, 1997).

In the case of very specialized libraries, such as medical and health scienceslibraries, it is not possible for a library to have in its local collection everythingthat its users may need. Health sciences library collections, in general, are devel-oped to support one or more of five basic activities within that institution. Theseinclude clinical practice and health care services; research by faculty, staff and

102 SELECTING MATERIALS FOR LIBRARY COLLECTIONS

students; education and training of health care professionals; administration ofhealth care services and educational programs; and, to a lesser degree than theothers, the preservation of institutional publications and related materials.

There are many similarities in acquisitions and collection development pro-cesses in all types of libraries. Acquisitions and collection development aretaking place in a rapidly changing environment. The nature of health sciencelibrary collections is being altered as we attempt to resolve access versus own-ership issues, and incorporate electronic and online formats with traditionalprint resources.

THE MEDICAL LITERATURE

In order to select appropriate items efficiently for a library collection, the li-brarian must first have an understanding of the role and purpose of the medicalliterature. Today, the definition of “literature” must incorporate new electronicand online formats as well.

The primary role of the literature in the scientific disciplines, including medi-cine, is to record and transmit discoveries and ideas that advance the state ofknowledge within that discipline. At its most basic, this role can be defined ascommunication and is made manifest through publication of information. Pub-lishing and scientific communication have been intertwined virtually since theissuance of the first scientific periodical in the 17th century (Richards, 1997).

There are differences between publication patterns among disciplines. Forexample, the scientist and the historian are divided not only by the language oftheir discipline but also by the form their works take. Historians communicateprimarily through books while scientists communicate primarily through arti-cles, largely because of the rapid pace of scientific discovery and the require-ment that results be published and communicated quickly (Funk, 1996).

The principal challenge for acquisitions is to explore the medical literaturein its broadest interpretation and to determine which segments or pieces of thatliterature are most appropriate to support the information needs of the group ofusers associated with the library. Medical and scientific literature is generallydivided into three categories: primary, secondary and tertiary.

Primary level material includes source documents, such as journals, mono-graphs, treatises, manuscripts, patient records, prints, portraits, and collateralreference items that contain original observations, annotated bibliographies,and dictionaries. Primary serials sources include journals containing originalpeer-reviewed articles and focus on a general or specialist audience.

Secondary level material includes reviews, state-of-the-art summaries,textbooks, interpretations of primary sources, and conclusions derived from

Susan Suess 103

primary sources. Secondary serial sources include those that publish reviewarticles, summaries of current opinions, and news items. Tertiary level mate-rial includes the remainder of the synthetic literature, or repackaging of the pri-mary literature for a purpose other than that intended by the author, such aspopular treatments, annuals, handbooks, and encyclopedias. Tertiary serialssources include indexes and abstracts and other similar guides to serial litera-ture (Richards, 1997).

Among the considerations for acquisitions decision making are the degreeof importance of each level to the range of clinical, research, or educational ac-tivity supported by the library collection. In general, the greater the researcheffort the more the library should collect primary level materials. Similarly,the collection that primarily supports an education program will have a higherneed for secondary and tertiary level material.

GROWTH RATES

Anyone who has ever visited a bookstore, or accessed websites such as Am-azon.com or Barnes&Nobles.com, is aware of the incredible volume of pub-lishing that takes place each year. Given today’s publishing environment, itmay be hard to believe that in 1800, there were approximately 90 scientificjournals being published. By 1900, that figure has risen to more than 10,000. In1994, there were more than 35,000 active periodical publications in the healthsciences (Richards, 1997). According to Bowker Annual Library & BookTrade Almanac, approximately 6,200 new medical books are published eachyear (Bogart, 2002). To further confirm these publishing trends we can look attwo studies that have been done in this arena.

DeSolla Price plotted growth rates of scientific literature over time and con-cluded that the literature of most scientific disciplines doubles every fifteenyears. This growth rate has been relatively constant across scientific disci-plines, including the health sciences (DeSolla Price, 1963). Lock, however,challenged DeSolla Price’s explosion of literature theory calling it an illusion.Lock suggested that in fact the rate of expansion of the literature has been rela-tively constant at 5 to 7% per year (Lock, 1989). There is truth in each theorybecause each author justifies his view by examining the growth process fromdifferent perspectives. DeSolla Price examines all literature while Lock exam-ines what he regards as the core periodical literature of various disciplines.Whichever measuring stick one uses, the growth rate for medical literature issignificant and is something of particular importance to acquisitions librariansbecause it is from this publishing universe that library collections are selected.Factors affecting growth rates of the scientific literature include the increasing

cost of science, especially instrumentation; the degree of specialization lead-ing to fragmentation of disciplines; and the converse, an increase in interdisci-plinary approaches to scientific disciplines.

With publishing in the medical field increasing each year, there are moreitems available than any single library can acquire. The world’s largest medi-cal library, the U.S. National Library of Medicine, has a collection of morethan 6 million items and approximately 20,300 subscriptions (U.S. NationalLibrary of Medicine, 2002).

THE ACADEMIC MARKET

Certainly the academic market is a formidable one. Statistical Abstracts ofthe United States shows that in FY1998, academic libraries spent $4.6 billionon materials. With approximately 4,600 academic libraries in the UnitedStates, with budgets ranging from $100,000 to $1 million, these libraries repre-sent an important part of the library world and a substantial market for publish-ers (U.S. Census Bureau, 2002; U.S. Center for Educational Statistics, 1998,Hoffert, 1998).

Academic medical librarians responsible for acquisitions face a challengingtask. From a plethora of medical books published each year, academic medical li-brarians must select those most useful to their patrons. The few short core collec-tion lists that are available are intended for use in the small hospital or internalmedicine department library. As these are the only selection tools available, how-ever, many academic medical librarians spend considerable time reviewing thesecollection lists and place heavy emphasis on acquiring books from these lists.

Selecting materials for inclusion in the collection of an academic medicallibrary can be a complex process. As already stated, the needs of the library cli-entele, the current collection’s strengths and weaknesses, the demands of co-operative collection agreements, the need to preserve historically importantdocuments, the available space, and the budgetary limitations must all be con-sidered.

A selection source designed for academic medical libraries would identifythe most useful groups of texts for academic library patrons. Calls for the pro-duction of such selection sources have been heard intermittently. There is alsosome feeling that the level of specialization in the sciences minimizes the po-tential number of readers, which makes scientific book publishing a more riskyeconomic enterprise. Consequently medical librarians are left with severalshort lists of standard authoritative medical reference works.

Susan Suess 105

OVERVIEW OF SELECTION TOOLS

Numerous selection tools are available to librarians. However, few of thesetools are specifically intended to assist academic medical librarians with selec-tion. Below are the most common types of selection tools.

“Core” lists are highly selective guides to the literature that can be veryhelpful tools to the librarian selecting items for a library collection. One of themost recognized names in selection and most commonly used sources is theSelected List of Books and Journals for Small Medical Libraries, compiled byAlfred Brandon and Dorothy Hill and known familiarly as the Brandon/HillList. This selection tool began biennial publication of a list of standard re-sources for the small hospital library in 1965 and continued to be published inthe April issue of the Journal of the Medical Library Association in odd-num-bered years. Starting with 2003, the Brandon-Hill Medical list will be pub-lished online only at www.brandonhill.com. This list offers a recommendedlist of books and periodicals, organized primarily by subject, and is designedas a selection guide for small and medium sized health sciences libraries. Anew feature since the 15th edition in 1993 is the inclusion of a “minimal corelist” chosen from the overall list.

A study by Murphy and Buchinger (1996) was designed to determine howthe Brandon/Hill list was used during the general collection development ac-tivities of academic health sciences librarians in the United States and Canada.The survey found that inclusion on the Brandon/Hill list was the fourth mostimportant factor, ranking below “recommendations from primary clientele,”“circulation history of previous edition” and “frequency of interlibrary loan re-quests.” Inclusion on the list was ranked as more important in the selectionprocess than recommendations from librarian colleagues.

In addition to the Brandon-Hill Medical List there are also lists in Nursingand Allied Health. Professional societies and organizations often provide corelists or “opening day” collection guides. Examples of these types of lists wouldbe Ambulatory Surgery Center Core Library Collection (AORN, 2001), Os-teopathic Medicine: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide to the Literature(Elam, 1998), and Opening Day Book Collection (Association of Vision Sci-ence Librarians, 2002). Many disciplines have prepared lists that can be usefulchecklists for collection development and assessment.

Other commonly used sources for librarians include publishers’ and ven-dors’ catalogues, cataloguing records from NLM, acquisitions lists from othermedical libraries, and reviews in medical and library journals. Specialty jour-nals such as JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, Annals of InternalMedicine and Doody’s Health Sciences Book Review Journal often include re-views of books and journals in selected issues each year. Other resources tar-

geted specifically for librarians include Serials Review, Ulrich’s InternationalPeriodical Directory, The Serials Directory, Books in Print, and MedicalBooks and Periodicals in Print.

The challenge is to obtain the information as quickly as possible, with theleast effort, avoiding redundancy but missing little. The number of sourcesused will depend on how comprehensive, or conversely how selective, the col-lection is. The depth of collecting for different topics within a library mayvary; the sources used to identify materials will also vary accordingly.

JOURNALS

Serials are the core of health sciences library collections. In contrast to books,serials provide a rapid channel for the dissemination of information on specifictopics. For this reason, they are ideally suited to the kinds of information ex-change required by the volatile and highly specialized arena of biomedicine,fully exploiting the flexibility of the serials format, from the clinical case studyto the review article, from the highly structured clinical trial report to the prelim-inary finding from the laboratory bench.

The trend in serials acquisitions is towards a hybrid of print and electronicserials products. Negotiating licensing agreements and knowledge of com-puter networks are fast becoming commonplace requirements for librarianswho deal with serials. Document delivery trends are also blurring the tradi-tional serials versus interlibrary loan lines. As technology makes it easier to ac-quire requested articles, libraries are reconsidering annual subscriptions, goingfrom title-level acquisitions to article-level acquisitions.

ELECTRONIC/ONLINE

The increasing availability of information in electronic formats presents anew challenge to librarians in acquisitions and collection development. Elec-tronic and online information compete with traditional print sources for budgetdollars and now consume a larger percentage of library budgets than ever before.Whether the format is CD-ROMs, interactive video disks, or hypertext pro-grams, librarians must be aware of the special characteristics, benefits, and dis-advantages of each and be familiar with the format structure, characteristics andtechnical requirements. Special considerations include technical requirementsand licensing. Will the product be mounted on a single workstation, a library orinstitutional LAN, or accessed through global networks such as the Internet?

The selection of electronic publications parallels that of monographs and se-rials in many ways. The fundamental difference between these resources and

Susan Suess 107

traditional resources is that the library is purchasing a license to use the softwareor product rather than purchasing outright ownership. Librarians will need toembrace the concept of access rather than ownership. For electronic publicationsto completely replace print resources, they will need to be commonplace, conve-nient and cheap (Richards, 1997).

HOSPITAL LIBRARIES

The acquisitions process in hospital libraries is not dramatically differentfrom acquisitions in academic or other types of medical libraries, though someimportant distinctions can be drawn. The hospital librarian generally has akeener knowledge of the library’s collection as well as a more detailed knowl-edge of the user groups. There is usually a substantial difference in the level offinancial resources available for library purchases and there is a greater reli-ance on resource sharing in responding to information needs of the user group.Brandon and Hill have observed that collection development in hospital set-tings is different because errors in selection are relatively more costly and cer-tainly more obvious than in a large medical center library (Brandon, 1965).Hospital libraries tend also to have a greater involvement of library users in theselection process, frequently in the form of a library committee that providesinput to a process coordinated by the librarian. An intimate knowledge of theclinical and research programs of the hospital is critical to the process.

CONCLUSION

Libraries of all sizes are affected by the same realities: shrinking budgets,rising costs, expanding information sources and, for health sciences libraries, aradically changing health care environment. In a challenging economic envi-ronment, as acquisitions budgets dwindle and the number of available titlesgrows, libraries must make certain that acquisitions dollars are spent on mate-rials that patrons actually use. Libraries’ rate of acquisitions for the generalcollection will decrease and the rate of information obtained for specificend-users, either via the library or bypassing it completely, will increase.

REFERENCES

Ambulatory surgery center core library collection. (2001). Retrieved January 6, 2003,from the Association of Operating Room Nurses Web site: http://www.aorn.org/Library/corelib.htm.

Bogart, D. (Ed.). Bowker annual library & book trade almanac. (2002). Medford, NJ:Information Today.

Brandon, A. N., & Hill, D. R. (1965). Selected list of books and journals for the smallmedical library 1965. Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, 53, 329-64.

DeSolla Price, D. (1963). Little science, big science. New York: Columbia UniversityPress.

Elam, C. S. (1998). Osteopathic medicine: An annotated bibliography and guide to theliterature. Chicago: Medical Library Association.

Fact sheet–The National Library of Medicine. (2002). Retrieved January 6, 2003, from theNational Library of Medicine Web site: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/nlm.html.

Funk, M. E. (1996). Monograph acquisitions. In Morse, D. H. (Ed.) Acquisitions inhealth sciences libraries. Lanham, MD: Medical Library Association and TheScarecrow Press.

Hill, D. R., & Sticknell, H. N. (2001). Brandon/Hill selected list of print books andjournals for the small medical library. Bulletin of the Medical Library Association,89, 131-153.

Hoffert, B. (1998.) Book report, part 2: What academic libraries buy and much theyspend. Library Journal, 123, 144-6.

Lock, S. P. (1989). “Journalology”: Are the quotes needed? CBE Views, 12, 57-59.Murphy, S. C., & Buchinger, K. (1996). Academic health sciences librarians’ use of

the Brandon-Hill selected list in book selection activities; results of a preliminarydescriptive study. Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, 84, 427-432.

Opening day book collection. (2002). Retrieved January 6, 2003, from the Associationof Visual Sciences Librarians Web site: http://www.opt.indiana.edu/guideline/appB.html.

Richards, D. T. (1997). Collection development and assessment in health sciences li-braries. Chicago: Medical Library Association.

U.S. Census Bureau. (2002). Statistical abstract of the United States. Washington, DC:Author.

U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement. Aca-demic libraries: 1998. (2001). Retrieved January 6, 2003, from the National Center forEducational Statistics Web site: http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/libraries/highlights.asp#academic.

Susan Suess 109

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