Using a TinyURL as a Work-Around
By Ginger Bopp, MLS
Regional Library Manager
St. Vincent Mercy Medical Center/St. Charles Mercy Hospital/St. Anne Mercy Hospital
Toledo, Ohio
At my hospitals, St. Vincent Mercy Medical Center/St. Charles Mercy Hospital/St. Anne Mercy Hospital, the library does not have its own server, technical support people, or web designer. We get good support for PC breakdowns, but we are far from the primary client. Hospital financial operations, patient care functions that include automated medication systems (Admin-Rx) and electronic health records, radiology archiving, and online access are among the other client groups vying for our Information Services. That’s why I use a work-around to help our users obtain access to our resources.
I use a customized PubMed URL to bring clients to a clinical medicine search engine with my local holdings links. This isn’t original; I have discussed it with other librarians and heard how others are doing this. I’m offering this documentation as a case report–I found that my clients wanted to know what journals our libraries own or can quickly supply (our local holdings), and this is an answer I can provide with my current budget and staffing. The URL http://www.tinyurl.com/crotn will take my users to a PubMed customized for my hospitals.
This is a work-around for a library OPAC with detailed links to my online journals. I have SERHOLD records for St. Vincent Mercy Medical Center’s (SVMMC) library and St. Charles Mercy Hospital’s library, and I include OhioLINK. St. Vincent is a departmental library of University of Toledo Health Science Campus, giving us OhioLINK. In fact, SVMMC Library is a net lender to OhioLINK network libraries.
LinkOut at National Library of Medicine (NLM) discloses my journal holdings entered in SERHOLD. My subscription agent, EBSCO, manages updates for what’s available via EBSCO links, and the OhioLINK staff manages what’s available via OhioLINK. I would not have time to maintain these links for 400 journals, adding each issue as it is published or released from embargo.
I use a handout to introduce the tinyurl webpage, which links immediately to the longer NCBI page with library holdings embedded in the URL. When I do orientation talks for medical students or residents coming to my hospitals, I include a handout with the tinyurl. Our staff does new-employee meetings with this tool also. I stress that our collections have been customized for each hospital, but that we have backup resources through networks such as Ohiolink and NLM.
Ginger Saha from the Cleveland Health Sciences Library reminded me that a tinyurl which also included free full-text journals would increase access to full-text for my clients, but I have not made that change as yet. I hope this case report will assist others to use this model and improve upon it for better service to clients. Many thanks to Sandy Swanson Of Michigan Health Science Library Association for her encouragement to try new technologies.
