Community hospitals and the Internet: lessons from pilot connections

Community hospitals in rural and isolated areas have had little access to the Internet. In 1992, the National Library of Medicine funded a pilot project to be conducted by the University of Washington and seven community hospitals in the northwestern United States. The goals of the project were to connect the hospitals to the Internet and study the uses made of this resource. A number of administrative, technical, financial, and organizational problems were dealt with in the attempt to establish the Internet connections and introduce this resource to these health care settings. This paper examines these issues and presents conclusions drawn from the experiences of the project team.

Connecting the health sciences community to the Internet: the NLM/NSF grant program

In 1992, as part of its high-performance computing and communications initiative, the National Library of Medicine decided to provide health sciences institutions with Internet connection grants similar to those offered to universities by the National Science Foundation. Although library involvement is not required, librarian and library uses have been the most common category in the applications received.

A cost-sharing formula for online circulation and a union catalog through a regional, multitype library cooperative

The experience of the Capitol Region Library Council and the University of Connecticut Health Center in developing a cost allocation formula for a circulation and online catalog shared by twenty-nine libraries is reviewed. The resulting formula identifies a basic unit cost as a minimum for each system participant.

OCLC for the hospital library: the justification plan for hospital administration

This paper delineates the necessary steps to provide hospital administrators with the information needed to evaluate an automated system, OCLC, for addition to the medical library. Based on experience at the Norton-Children's Hospitals, included are: (1) cost analyses of present technical processing systems and cost comparisons with OCLC; (2) delineation of start-up costs for installing OCLC; (3) budgetary requirements for 1981; (4) the impact of automation on library systems, personnel, and services; (5) potential as a shared service; and (6) preparation of the proposal for administrative review.