Common catalogue of medical libraries
Vizvári Dóra
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Országos Egészségtudományi Szakkönyvtár
GYEMSZI is the sustaining institute of the state hospitals in Hungary. These hospitals are mostly general hospitals but there are some specialized hospitals too. The hospitals are independent, but now they are parts of a system. Presently, 108 hospitals belong to GYEMSZI.
The service of scientific literautre is the duty of the hospital medical libraries. This could be dissimilar in the several hospitals. In these days 65 hospitals have medical libraries.
Our library, the National Medical Library have a respectable past. The foundation was in 1953. It is still the part of the national system of specialized libraries, one of our functions is the production of the Hungarian Medical Bibliography.
After the merger of institutes, the library itself became part of GYEMSZI, but kept the duties. In addition, a formerl function was renewed: our library manages the support and the cooperation of the hospital medical libraries confined within GYEMSZI.
In 2012, we got the possibility to develop a common catalogue, and this effected an improvement in the hospital medical libraraies. To build a common catalogue, the libraries had to have integrated library systems.
In January 2013, we contacted the leaders of the hospitals with an proposal: the hospital library would get an ILS, and the hospital assumes retrospective processing of the library holdings and gives service to health workers whose hospital does not have own library.
The offered ILS software is NETLIB LTD’s SZIKLA system. The reason was the good experiences, as our library also have SZIKLA ILS, additionally our library has the biggest holdings.
In October 2013, our library celebrated its 60th anniversary and a conference was held. At this occasion we presented the common catalogue too. The URL: http://kozkat.gyemszi.hu
In my presentation I would like to show the details of this cooperation, the process, the aims and the results.