Providing Journals to Developing Countries (7)
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Margaret Mathai's concerns expressed a couple of weeks ago to HELINA and then
AHILA-NET probably echo those felt by many of us working in health
information.
At this library we are waiting (but not holding our breath) for Internet
access. From what we hear from all directions, North, South, East and West, it
is going to create as many problems as it solves.
Our narrow bandwidths willl make access very slow. The specific journals we
need articles from will not be freely available if at all. The range of free
information is vast and will need real expertise to mine in a cost-effective
way. Connect time, passwords and downloads will cost Real Money.
The British Medical Journal recently published a table in which the Editor
Richard Smith assessed the usefulness of various information sources. (BMJ
1996;313:1062-8). In it the Internet *now* was considered of low relevance,
low
validity, low usefulness and high work (time and effort needed). The Internet
*in ten years' time* was predicted to be of high relevance, high validity and
high usefulness and low work input. (But what about access costs, we may well
ask. Well, we have allies working on our behalf on that problem, I hear).
Medical librarians in Africa, helped by guidance to useful Web sites from
friends and supporters here and overseas, will, of course, do their best to
exploit the World Wide Web when it comes their way; but in the meantime
most of
us don't have budgets to cover the costs of browsing the Web, let alone the
communications infrastructure and hardware; we're also desperately short of
current books and journals...
In the meantime, as Margaret Mathai points out, abstracts from CD-ROM are
being used in a way they were not intended to be used - as a substitute for
the
full-text article. I brought up this problem in a paper I presented at
7ICML in
Washington in 1995, and summarised a small survey on the use of MEDLINE
abstracts here - where literature reviews, therapeutic and other clinical
decisions often have to be based on abstracts alone, because of the delays,
difficulties and expense incurred in getting hold of full text articles.
The survey showed that 20% of users found that abstracts *usually* provided
information complete in itself, and 53% found that they *sometimes* did. Since
that seems like a huge advance on little or no current information at all we
have to be thankful we have MEDLINE on the premises... With luck our users
(clinicians and teachers in particular) take into account the *validity* of
the
source of the abstract - if it comes from a prestigious journal known to be
authoritative, rigorously refereed, preferably with a high impact rating?, and
is in the form of a structured summary of the research done, there is less
risk
of the limited information being misleading or inaccurate.
(In these days when the trend (in the West) is to rely as far as possible on
evidence-based medicine, (i.e. on scientifically defensible treatments or
interventions) the abstracts should ideally be based on systematic reviews of
randomised controlled trials in the specific problem areas).
All we've got to do is watch the trends while lobbying for bigger budgets
and a
higher proportion of institutional budgets*; for donor support for core
collections of books and journals - as well as for computer hardware and
software; for support from users or associations of such potential supporters
as, e.g. Friends of the Library, or graduates with a soft spot for their Alma
Maters etc. That's all!
Best wishes Helga
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* We recently reminded our Very Senior Management that the practice in most
universities is to award between 3% and 7% of the entire institutional
budget to
the Library; and as, I gather, we are only receiving about 1%, this undersized
share is now the subject of a review... watch this space.
Helga Patrikios, Deputy University Librarian
Medical Librarian
University of Zimbabwe
P.O. Box M.P. 45, Mount Pleasant
Harare, Zimbabwe
Tel +263-4-791631
Fax +263-4-795019
e-mail: patrikios@healthnet.zw
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