Paola Iannucci

The Libraries of the University of Ferrara (Italy) make great efforts to help their parent University in pursuing the strategic goals related to Education and Research, as well as its commitment in the social, cultural and economic development of society (Third Mission). A specific strategy was then worked out by focusing on care and promotion of special collections, which are not only unique and therefore able to identify the holding institution but also fascinating and often of local interest. The strategy is displayed on the left handside of the poster: taking the opportunities provided by relevant networks - like Ferrara area Libraries - as well as by cooperation, synergy and partnership with other public institutions or private entities, since 2008 the Unife Libraries have been trying to make internal and external stakeholders aware of the heritage and its value and to outreach and engage new audiences, also non-academic. The central part of the poster highlights the most impor...

Clinical users expectations from medical informatics are evolving due to the wide availability of biomedical information services on the Internet. Thanks to hypertexts and advanced browsing tools users with no informatical expertise can travel on the Internet and easily gain access to textual databases. With a multimedia computer other kinds of information can be grabbed: images, sounds and audiovisual documents. Basic Internet services (electronic mail, discussion lists, file transfer protocol, terminal emulation) can be accessed from a wide range of hardware equipment. However, the real power of a world-scale computer network like the Internet will be unleashed only when its global connectivity will be linked to the powerful retrieval ability of existing clinical and related databases. While biomedical journals editors and other medical information providers are in the way to offer electronic versions of their paper-based products, at the leading edge of this world-scale process i...

The Medline database: who produces it? What does it offer? How do you access it? What is necessary to know in order to extract useful information out of it? How can you apply correct and efficient bibliographic search strategies to the biomedical fields? What are the search steps to get useful citations out of the database? How can you select the sources? Which web services offer Medline free of charge? These are the main questions that the book aim to answer. As a methodological guide to bibliographic search methods as well as a practical guide to the Internet web services that offer a free access to Medline, this book aims at teaching health professionals and researchers how to use Medline and Internet to find useful and uptodate bibliographic information.

Measure of usefulness of Medline searches requested for clinical problems. open prospective uncontrolled study lasted for 3 months. Collection of online or CD-ROM Medline searches operated by clinicians or librarians at 5 biomedical libraries. User interviews about use and usefulness of Medline, recorded with a closed-answer self-administered questionnaire, adapted from a U.S. National Library of Medicine product. Of the 6 participating libraries, one was excluded from analysis from data collection inadequacies. Among 668 searches, 55 (8.2%) were produced for real patients. Physicians judgement about clinical usefulness of their searches (available for 46 cases) indicate a significant importance for diagnostic evaluation (23%) and therapy administration (46%). After applying search results into clinical practice, clinicians think that positive outcomes are achieved in the doctor-patient-family relationship area (19%), a better use of health care system facilities is obtained (26%) a...

ABSTRACT Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a personal story about the use of statistics to help protect library services at the Library of the Department of Statistics at Bologna University. Design/methodology/approach – This paper describes the statistics used uncritically by the Centralized Library Services of the University, their inadequacy, and greater utility of the data gathered by the Statistics Library together with those of the University of Ferrara. Findings – The data gathered by the Statistics Library and those of the University of Ferrara provided a richer and more valid image of their services and their value to the user community, than the limited, somewhat old-fashioned and simplistic metrics of the Centralized Library Services. Originality/value – This successful approach helped change the mind of senior library management at a time of retrenchment. It is hoped that it will inspire others to challenge simplistic snapshots of services and strengthen their cases with more representative data.