Author: VKG Nair
Article title: The Central Library
The central library of the Pushpagiri Institute of Medical Sciences and Research Centre started functioning in early 2002 with a small collection inherited from the parent organization, i.e. the Pushpagiri Hospital, which unlike many general hospitals, cared to keep essential books and other documents in its departments. On completion of construction of the Medical College building, the library was shifted to its C-Block on the second floor with an area of 1080 Square metres. It has a general reading room for students, an external reading room, a staff reading room, two periodicals rooms � one for current journals and the other for back volumes, an audio-visual room, and an internet room with a total seating capacity of over 250.
Plans are afoot to construct a separate library building with all modern amenities to make the library central in its true sense so as to serve all institutions within the campus of the organization.
There is at present a collection of 6300 new books purchased during the course of the past three years and they are the latest and the best books covering all branches of Medicine including subjects of super speciality. The old inherited collection is also preserved and this would form part of a special collection on �History of Medicine� which is expected to be a valuable source of reference when the Research Centre would start functioning. A classified sequence of arrangement using DDC supported by a computerized data base, an Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) for resource search, and an open access to the shelves are provided as basic facilities.
The library is subscribing to 85 standard Medical periodicals comprising sixty well established foreign journals of repute.
Twenty-two computers are made available in the library of which a dozen terminals are provided exclusively for internet browsing. There is a fair collection of CD-ROMs and these are being made accessible, other than in the terminals in the library, to all the departments through a digital library server linked by a LAN. The library subscribes to MEDLINE database and the entire back volumes (from 1966 to 2004) of it on DVD constitute another valuable collection of the library that would enable information search and retrieval more simple, exhaustive and quick.
Building up of a conventional hard copy collection of back volumes of journals is in the process and there are around 250 volumes already available in the library.
Other facilities include extended hours of working of the library up to 20.00 hrs (which itself is planned to be increased later) and reprographic services.
The library has scores of future plans as well. These include subscribing to a few medical databases (like MDConsult and ProQuest Medical Library) and a few e-journals, indexing articles appearing in current periodicals received in the library and providing an exclusive OPAC for it. Yet another plan is a wider and efficient networking so that the entire library resources and services are accessible to all units � of the College, the Hospital, other institutions in the campus, the hostels and the residential quarters of the doctors and faculty members. And finally, planning and preparations have to be made for linking and resource sharing with other medical colleges, universities (INFLIBNET), and other national (like DELNET) as well as international level databases, especially in health sciences
