TechNique: January 2006

My library and me

Hi, my name is Gemma Willcocks and I am the library technician at Ballarat Health Services Medical Library in regional Victoria. As we are the only medical library in Ballarat we cater for the acute, geriatric and psychiatric sites along with the private hospital and outlying rural hospitals. This provides us with a broad range of topics and patrons and as it is a specialised library it allows us to get to know our patrons on a more personal level. Working in such a small team (2.4 EFT), allows me to gain skills and experiences in a variety of different areas.

My main tasks include handling of all inter-library loans, distributing current awareness materials such as bulletins and table of contents alerts and serials accessioning. Other tasks include literature searching, shelving, training, maintaining audio visual equipment, shelf reading, statistics and end processing to name a few.

The health library industry in Australia works co-operatively in a number of ways. GratisNet inter library loan system is a reciprocal system in which you supply one article to another library free of charge in exchange for an article from their collection. This system works fantastically with colleagues around Australia working together to provide staff with much needed health information. It is also an extremely efficient system with fast turn around times. Colleagues also share duplicated and unwanted items allowing hospitals to fill their missing gaps in order to provide a completed collection.

On a monthly basis we prepare a current awareness bulletin for staff members highlighting new journal articles of interest. Categories such as general medicine, nursing, surgery, rehabilitation, psychiatry and specialty are included. This coincides with sending out table of content alerts to interested parties from new journals that we have received. It also allows us to highlight articles written by staff members.

The variety of journals we receive and can access is enormous. Currently we subscribe to approximately 100 hard cover journals and have access to almost 1000 online journals through databases such as OVID and ProQuest. Many are well known journals such as the Medical journal of Australia or Australian nursing journal down to the more specialised such as Topics in stroke rehabilitation, Infection control and hospital epidemiology or Age and ageing.

I thoroughly enjoy working at Ballarat Health Services due to the variety of tasks I get to perform and the number of different people I get to work with. Medical libraries are a fantastic place to work and I am always learning new things. However I am still slowly learning all the medical terminology even after doing a course in it. Thank god for the medical dictionaries!