Side-by-side, but from different worlds: service and resource provision by academic health sciences libraries to their affiliated hospitals.

Abstract

The nature of the affiliations between large, academic health sciences centers and their teaching hospitals vary tremendously from institution to institution. During the past few decades, many university-run teaching hospitals have shifted governance to the private, corporate sector [1]. The sometimes complex governance and organizational structure among these institutions can complicate the library's provision of services and online resources. For example, since the 1997 merger of the university-governed hospital at the University of Nebraska Medical Center with a privately owned hospital, the university's McGoogan Library of Medicine has made great strides in extending services and resource access to the hospital. However, access to online resources such as electronic journals and other bibliographic and clinical tools remains a challenge. The authors searched the literature in hopes of finding guidance for navigating these challenges but found a substantive lack of journal literature regarding the relationship and resource sharing arrangements between the academic library and its institution's clinical partners. Information can be pieced together from articles about education, staff sharing, Integrated Advanced Information Management Systems (IAIMS) projects, and consortia licensing among libraries and governments, but information that focuses on the academic health sciences library–hospital partnership and its challenges is lacking [2–8]. The 2006–2007 Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AASHL) annual statistics addressed library service to affiliated hospitals, asking many similar questions, but the AAHSL survey and data were not available until after this study was conducted [9].