| Louisiana
State University Health Sciences Center School of Dentistry 
Spring 2002 |
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| Library
Services
Browsing Collection: A Wealth of Dental News |
Library
Services The Dental Library Advisory Committee recently distributed a user satisfaction and awareness survey to dental school faculty and postgraduate students. Although the responses indicate that almost all users are satisfied with the library, they also show that a large number of people are unaware of our services and resources. Because the role of the library is to enhance the educational, research, and patient care experience of faculty and students, we want to make sure that people know about the services we provide. As the LSUHSC Libraries continue to add new electronic resources, it is important that we inform potential users about them and teach the effective use of these databases. The library still maintains print collections as well, and because we think they are important, we'll continue to promote them in the newsletter from time to time. The Newsletter Browsing Collection is featured in this issue. One traditional library service at the dental library since it opened in 1972 is our courier who delivers books and journals from the Isché Medical Library to the dental library twice daily, Monday through Friday. You can request the dental library staff to order any circulating journal or book, and it will be here that afternoon or the next day. All dental school faculty, students, and staff are invited to use this service. Another type of document delivery service is Interlibrary Loan (ILL), which provides access to books and journal articles at other libraries. In the article below, Julie Schiavo, ILL librarian, describes the service and what patrons can expect from it. A third type of document delivery now available through the library is electronic access to journals and books. Innopac, the LSUHSC libraries online catalog, provides links to the full text for each journal title, if available. The route to the full text varies among journal titles. Many of our subscriptions to print journals allow LSUHSC patrons to access articles online. The library also subscribes to aggregated publisher services, such as Ideal, Science Direct, and Synergy, which facilitate searching across a large number of titles. However, in these services, the full text is still available only in those journals to which the library has a print subscription. A number of titles have full text available via a database such as InfoTrac, Ovid, or MDConsult, and it is necessary to connect to that search service to find the desired article. Some journals restrict access to library staff members, and we will be glad to assist you in these cases. Linkout, a new feature of Pubmed, the MEDLINE gateway at the National Library of Medicine, provides a link from a citation in the database to electronic journals to which the LSUHSC libraries subscribe. Go into Pubmed from the dental library home page to link to the full text for these particular titles. If you have any questions about how to locate electronic journals, please contact a library staff member. Availability of years differs for each journal title. And remember that for journals to which the LSUHSC Libraries don't subscribe, the Interlibrary Loan Service is the best way to obtain copies of articles. LSU
School of Dentistry Library, 1100 Florida Ave., Box 229, New Orleans, LA.
70119
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