National Jewish Center for Immunology and Respiratory Medicine and its professional library, the Gerald Tucker Memorial Medical Library, are committed to the idea of resource sharing and cooperative projects in the health sciences library community to benefit the end-user of the health sciences information, the professional working with the patient or in the laboratory. National Jewish Center has brought together a group of libraries to work on a cooperative resource sharing project. The project, called the Shared Automated Library System (SALS) Enhancement Project, seeks to overcome some identified barriers to information access by the health-sciences professional served by small health sciences libraries: 1. Although the large CARL System for resource sharing exists in Colorado, access state-wide to small specialized local collections is inadequate. 2. The health sciences professional must learn to use a confusing array of systems to get health sciences information. 3. The library staff in each separate small library has difficulty with staff training for technological advancement. 4. Small libraries find it difficult to find a cooperative automation model to use as a comparison when making integrated automation decisions. The SALS Enhancement Project is positioned in a cooperative community of health sciences libraries in Colorado, influenced by the Colorado Council of Medical Librarians (CCML), the Denison Library at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, and the CARL System of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries. The CARL System is a cooperative integrated library system that has a telecommunications network throughout the state. To overcome these barriers in the information seeking process, the SALS Enhancement Project will meet these operational objectives: 1. To expand the present resources on the CARL System by adding four health sciences libraries. 2. To improve technical access to the CARL System for the patrons of the existing health sciences libraries and to provide initial technical access for the new libraries. 3. To educate the library staff of the participating libraries on the optimal use of the CARL System integrated library system. 4. To coordinate with the participating libraries those activities that can be done cooperatively and to evaluate and publicize the resource sharing activities of this project. It is anticipated that the SALS Enhancement Project will expand the health sciences resources available on the CARL system to the health sciences professionals and citizens of the state of Colorado, make the CARL system more technologically accessible within the work place of more health sciences professionals, through education of librarians and staff, create better quality bibliographical information for health sciences professional to access, and serve as a model of technological resource sharing and cooperation by evaluating and reporting their experience. The total cost of the project is $680,879. Of this $466,861 is being contributed by the various participating institutions. This request is for the balance needed of $214,018.
