Awareness week .....

It has been a funny old week in the NHS health library in a well known part of Birmingham …. We are a staff library in a teaching hospital, funded to support all hospital staff equally whether they are a consultant, placement student or secretary. We have been having an Awareness Week to attract new users, to advertise to existing users and also to demo a few of our selected products and services. And have been giving away pens and mugs like they were going out of fashion …. A large work stream for us are ILLS so have spent part of the week promoting our automated ILL requesting service. It allows users to request on or off site, tells us whether we have the item in stock and lets the user know at what stage their request is at. We mainly request journal articles rather than books and have local networks we can call upon, as well as using the BMA Library and the British Library. The journal articles are used mainly by clinicians directly for patient care or research which means requests are a priority for us. As part of the Awareness Week, we have been showing clinicians how to use Anatomy TV. It’s a 3D online anatomy resource where bits of our bodies can be rotated and layers can be added or removed to see exactly what is going on underneath our skin! The resource is used a lot during the teaching that goes on in the hospital. My highlight of the week was 20 senior hospital staff all sat wearing cardboard 3D glasses (no expense spared- we are the NHS afterall!) going ‘oooh’ and ‘aahhh’ at an image of a skull in 3D. On a serious note, it made me think about how resources are changing in libraries. Once upon a time everything was paper based but now anything goes. How does that affect us in ILLs ..? How will that affect our ILL networks … more licences or less … more work or less …? What do you think ..? Can you come and talk at a training event or Interlend about your experiences and how ILLs have changed or are changing ...? Let us know if you can ... Jennie (Marketing person FIL)