Parliament Hill Café beats ZB Med

On March 18th the news broke that the Senate of the Leibniz-Gemeinschaft had recommended to end funding ZB Med, Germany’s national library for Medicine and the second largest medical collection in the world.

Just a few days before North Londoners heard that the City of London Corporation (which owns Hampstead Heath) had decided to end the 33-year lease of the Parliament Hill Café to the d’Auria family, and hand the café over to the Benugo chain.

Three weeks later, 5,500 academics have signed a change.org petition to keep ZB Med, but the future of this important institution is still unclear. Meanwhile, over 23’000 supporters signed a petition against the City of London Corporation’s decision; Benugo – faced with such stiff opposition – subsequently withdrew its bid for the lease of the café.

ZB Med may simply be in the wrong business to attract a more substantial level of support from its customers.

Reinventing the ZB Med as ‘Leibniz Information Centre for Life Sciences’

Dr. Ulrich Korwitz, Librarian of the ZB Med, reported about the new strategy of the ZB Med in the wake of the evaluation two years ago. An extensive user consultation was undertaken, and the input from professors and research fellows used as a starting point for the new strategy.

Some highlights amongst the many adjustments to the ZB operations:

shift towards an advisory rôle to academic medical libraries, especially in the field of license negotiation (they will even hire a business lawyer)
focus on research and clinical practice
services to the pharmaceutical industry have been dropped
constant innovation which will include regular evaluation of assisting products and services
strong commitment to staff development, including a decrease of junior and increase of senior positions

This is a bold move by the ZB Med, or rather: the ‘Leibniz Information Centre for Life Sciences’. Especially the advisory services in the field of license negotiation were met with great approval by the audience.

Creating the European Library Quality Standards for Health (ELiQSR)

In the context of EBM libraries have become more important to medical education and research and to the delivery of healthcare services than ever. Surprisingly, there hasn’t been an adequate set of quality standards for the evaluation of medical libraries so far.

Janet Harrison, Clare Creaser and Marta de la Mano prepared a paper for the EAHIL 2014 conference about their development of an evaluation tool for medical libraries. Standards currently used by medical libraries are MLA and LQAF. The new standard will review these and other existing standards, but will take feedback from a survey of medical librarians across Europe into account.