Abstract
The collection of publications by World Health Organization (WHO) in the Medical Library contains documents published since 1950 to date which has been made available to the library free of charge by the WHO. The collection is very much under-used. A bibliometric study on the collection was carried out with the objective of making the readership and the library staff aware of what is available in the collection, which would indirectly improve the usage. The collection of WHO publications which is available in the Medical Library except periodicals was considered for the study. A head count on the total number of publications under study was obtained. The numbers of items in major subject divisions and in the most popular subject area within these divisions were counted separately. Contents of each publication in the collection were carefully read through in order to identify any specific topic or aspect of health on which the coverage was dominant. Items in monograph series were counted separately. Geographical coverage of contents of the publications was examined. A chronological evaluation of the collection was done by counting items published in each decade from 1950 to 2011. Data thus gathered was analyzed to obtain percentages of publications available in each category with respect to the total number. The results revealed that the collection contained information on various health related topics at national, regional and global levels. Collection needs to be improved by acquiring current publications. Journal of the University Librarians Association, Sri Lanka, Vol. 16, Issue 2, July 2012, Page 117-124 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4038/jula.v16i2.5203
Highlights
Disciplines which were covered by the collection substantially with respect to the total number are shown in Table 1 and Figure 1
It shows that the discipline which had the highest number of publications was Environmental Health (851), highest was in Clinical Medicine (550) and the order follows as Pharmacology & Toxicology (308), General Medicine (262), Health Care (230), Social Services (162) etc
During the study It was revealed that the collection includes very valuable and important publications such as “The International Classification of Diseases (ICD)” which is used internationally to classify diseases and other vital records on health problems, “Guidelines for management of snake bite in South-east Asian region” and “Dengue: Guidelines for diagnosis, treatment, prevention and control”
Summary
1. To make the users of the library aware of the available literature 2. To use the outcome of the study to improve the usage of the collection 3. To keep a record on the contents of the collection 5. To identify laps in order to improve the collection
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