Community Hospital Consumer Health Resources Catalog

Publication

Community Hospital Consumer Health Resources Catalog

Abstract

The project was to purchase and implement software and hardware to create an online catalog on the hospital/library website to make the library collection of consumer health materials more visible to people living in our region as well as local public and school library staff members. Our objective was to make our materials available to as many consumers in our region as possible. We hoped to increase our circulation by 40% in the first year after completion. Since the bar coding process has not been completed, we are not certain that the time frame planned was realistic, but still have increased our circulation of library materials and have increased our referrals from the local public library reference staff. We also hoped to improve library relations, network with other small libraries, and make our resources available to them so they were aware of our collection and able to focus their development on other areas of genre, which we think were accomplished through sharing with the local public library reference staff and networking with other small libraries at workshops in our region.