Dear HAT member

We would like to update you on recent developments:

New website
Since August Andrea has been working on our new website, with Felix contributing the design, as usual. The new site is much richer in features than the old one; the news ticker will be of particular interest to all of you. Please feel free to submit news to: news@camlis.eu. The Ann Hill Trust has indicated they are willing to fund more work on the CAM news front, and we hope soon to be in a position to pick up CAM stories from a wide range of media and alert you of breaking news via our website.

Collection development: new database and journal subscriptions
You may have tried them already: we now subscribe to Mantis and Global Health, via the same Ovid interface which you are used to already from Medline and AMED. A number of additional electronic and print journals will soon appear on our journals list, and additional display racks will be necessary to accommodate the print holdings.

Collection development: books
We have been working through course reading lists and other suggestions, selecting and placing orders. Many thanks to all who contributed; please keep sending in suggestions, either through the enterprofile.com account which you have been equipped with, or in any other format.

A first selection of e-books will soon be available once a suitable authentication method has been implemented. Although most of us prefer to read books in the traditional paper format, e-books can be very handy for certain purposes, e.g. for reference works which users want to consult in an instant, wherever they are, or for books that have to be accessed simultaneously by the participants of a class or seminar. Do feel free to pick e-books in your Enterprofile account where available and useful, or indicate in your suggestions of which titles you feel an e-edition would be preferable.

Reader services
The daily visitors' count at our door has gone up from 60 in October, to 107 in December. At busy times - on days with training events - there are often not enough desks to accommodate all readers. We are pleased with the rapid growth of demand, and hope to make additional desks with and without computers available soon.

Information Skills Training
Our introductory training sessions have been very popular in the last few months. Many of the readers who have done a training session, have become regulars in the reading room. We are pleased to see so many of our readers run quite complex database searches, export bibliographic records to bibliographic database, import from there into their paper... Sessions run virtually every week, so please feel free to promote them to members of your organisation!

On-line access
How popular our e-resources really are, we only realise when there is a fault - our phones then don't stand still any more... But our e-content providers, too, confirm that usage of our e-resources is surprisingly high! We will continue to add more resources.

New stakeholders
We would like to welcome amongst our stakeholders, the University of the Aegean; the Faculty of Integrated Medicine; the College of Traditional Acupuncture; the Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health; and the Ann Hill Trust. A number of organisations are hoping to join soon.

Rockefeller Neurology library moving temporarily into CAMLIS
As you know the UCLH trust has decided to put the Rockefeller Library, a UCL/UCLH library for Neurology and Neurosurgery, into our reading room while their facilities are being refurbished, from December 2009 to July 2010. We tried to prevent this scheme because we knew our space is hardly enough for our own readers, especially as the Rockefeller Library has almost as many daily visitors as we do. But UCLH forced its plan through regardless, with the one concession that should CAMLIS services be affected negatively by the reduction of space, some other accommodation would have to be found for the Rockefeller Library.

Just before Christmas Rockefeller library staff cleared some of our book cases to make space for their core collection; and the easy seating area which we are planning to convert to additional desks, now accommodates their enquiry desk. Computers for their readers have been put on our big central table. Space for another three Rockefeller Library staff has been made available in our stacks and archive area in the basement.

We realise that on busy days there are now not enough desks available for CAMLIS readers, but hope our readers will continue to use the library. If readers find the reading room too crowded, or had to wait for a desk or computer, they should complain to us, preferably in writing (email is fine), so that we can make our case for having the Rockefeller Library relocated elsewhere soon, rather than in July only.

Gerhard Bissels and Andrea Chandler
g.bissels@camlis.eu
www.CAM.nhs.uk

Tel: +44 (0)20 7391 8828