eBook Collection Debuts

by Howard Fuller

Librarian, The Health Library at Stanford

When The Health Library at Stanford created its first web site in 1995, our goal was to create a virtual branch, to provide the same type of experience one could expect when walking into the real library. In October 2000 we came just a bit closer to providing that experience. The Health Library at Stanford has taken the plunge into eBooks by purchasing 550 titles from netLibrary. The Health Library is making its entire eBook collection available via the Internet. Because eBooks are online, they're available anywhere, anytime. This collection can be found on our website (http://healthlibrary.stanford.edu) under "Resources." If you want to check a book out, you will need to set-up an account, which is a straightforward process and does not involve any purchase or exchange of private information. After three days, your "checkout" expires and the eBook returns itself to the collection. Our eBook collection contains 350 consumer health titles, 100 medical titles, and 100 healthcare administration titles. Usage statistics are changing daily and we hope to expand the collection in a way that will maximize usage and provide the subject content most sought by our world-wide customers.

Two other projects that are in constant development are our streaming media collection and our links directory (essentially a clipping file or what we use to refer to as a "vertical file"). The Health Library's popular collection of digitally streamed health videos is expected to double in the coming year. People from over 140 countries access this collection each month. This collection presents Stanford University Medical Center staff and faculty health education lectures that are professionally videotaped, edited and streamed. All videotapes are added to the library's video collection and available for checkout (and purchase and loan). This collection can be found on our website at http://healthlibrary.stanford.edu/videos.html.

The latest edition of our consumer health links directory recently debuted on our web site. This new directory links to over 2500 domains, is updated regularly, and links to only material that is scientifically based. Our goal is to provide layered information and link directly to documents on a specific topic. For example, instead of linking to CancerNet's home page, we link directly to a document discussing "lung cancer." We have developed a taxonomy by analyzing how users have crawled our web site over past years, reviewing the literature that discusses the search behavior of consumers who look for health information, analyzing and observing the behavior of patients and public use of two of our library branches. We believe this approach to content development, taxonomy design, deep document linking and content review creates a site that is of greater value to our customers.

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