Back to Index

CD-ROM: The Answer to a Librarian's Prayer?
Helga Patrikios
From Rowing Upstream: Snapshots of Pioneers of the Information Age in Africa
ISBN 0-620-28913-9
2002

Read more about "Rowing Upstream: snapshots of pioneers of the information age in Africa" at http://www.piac.org/rowing_upstream/about.html

This is the story of how we in Harare first got connected to the world’s premier medical database, MEDLINE, and at last felt part of the Real World of health information.

MEDLINE is the computerized version of the printed Index Medicus. In the mid-1960s, the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) made its computerized databases, including MEDLINE, available to users in the US and throughout the North, and in a couple of semi-industrialized countries in the South, by telephone and Telnet. We tried to get dial-up access to MEDLINE in 1986, but we could not meet the technical and financial demands of connectivity with the NLM databases.

In 1987, I was traveling in the North, visiting medical libraries and finding out what was new in medical information. That was when I first heard my Northern colleagues discussing CD-ROM and MEDLINE in the same breath. I first saw the two in action together in the library of a London teaching hospital. I was instantly smitten with what seemed like a miracle—MEDLINE in situ. On the spot. Standalone. Uninterruptable. Independent of vulnerable and archaic telephone lines. All of that, plus an amazingly user-friendly interface. In a couple of minutes, you could search all the segments (twenty or thirty years’ worth) of MEDLINE, and winkle out four or forty perfect hits, with abstracts, from among the seven (now 13) million other citations.

It was almost indescribable. Comparing a search of the printed Index Medicus—the hours of often unrewarding toil, and not an abstract in sight—with a search of MEDLINE on CD-ROM is like comparing a ride on a cranky donkey up a rocky hillside with a flight on the Concorde from New York to Paris. In other words: no comparison.

We knew we had to have CD-ROM. A colleague in Pediatrics suggested we write to the Carnegie Corporation of New York. In no time, we received a positive response to our request that they fund a pilot study of CD-ROM, and within weeks we had the first-ever microcomputer in the Library system, with a set of four drives and a dot-matrix printer. Response to the availability of this new service was gradual: for a brief period, we conducted only about 80 searches a month. But it wasn’t long before word of the power of CD-ROM spread around the medical community. Within a year or two, we and our users were doing hundreds of searches each month; renewed projects with Carnegie provided the work stations we needed for the rapidly-growing number of searches we were conducting. Early on, with the US National Research Council and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, we negotiated with two MEDLINE publishers—Ovid and Silver Platter—for African countries to be granted very generously-discounted subscription rates. These rates remain in place to this day.

Now that we have Internet access in the Library, we can access MEDLINE online, but many of us still prefer CD-ROM, with its dependable, lightning-fast response. (Internet response times here sometimes remind me of that donkey.) I know of at least one medical school in Washington, DC that has fine, fast Internet facilities for its staff and users, but also continues to subscribe to the CD-ROM version of MEDLINE, for the same reasons.

Most libraries in Africa have suffered acutely from the continent’s prevailing economic decline; few have access to current journals or textbooks. In Zimbabwe, too, we now have very few current textbooks, and our collection of journals is constantly shrinking. A 1995 survey I made of the use of MEDLINE on CD-ROM at our library shows the great extent to which our users depend on those MEDLINE abstracts. This situation is far from satisfactory, from the point of view of researchers and clinicians, but it certainly beats having no access at all to current information on specific topics—which is often the only other option.

Given the difficulties for most institutions in Africa of providing reliable and plentiful access to the Internet, it’s unsurprising to see that CD-ROM has a growing role as an intermediate information technology. Many NGOs concerned with the dissemination of health information increasingly place their trust and their information in CD-ROM—a reliable, low-cost way to store, transport, copy and distribute information, and one that will support the development process in poor countries for years to come.

Helga Patrikios grew up in Burma, New York and Belfast, and took a degree in modern languages and literature at Trinity College, Dublin. Sixteen years later, while raising her children in Zimbabwe, she took the Higher Diploma in Library Science by correspondence with the University of South Africa. Her first job as a librarian was by chance in the Medical Library of the University of Zimbabwe, and she has been there ever since. She is now Deputy Librarian at the University Library, remaining in charge of the Medical Library.

Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.

TOP