3) Discription: Francis A. Countway Medical Library

                                                              AMENITIES

                                     

The library seems to have all the amenities covered.  There are vending machines, scanner/color printer, copiers, Ingenuity Accounts (Bioinformatics), 30 public computers, 18 computers in the classroom, and for checkout: 10 laptops, iPad or e-book readers with your choice of apple or windows operating system.  In house services: headphones, eight outlets to each table, Ethernet cords WI-FI, group, meeting, and quiet study room areas. They have ample room with both comfortable chairs and non-plush chair table sets. The cell phone is permitted in the 1st Floor lobby, the 5th Floor, and in closed study rooms. There is also the therapy dog named cooper that can be checked out for 30 minutes, Tuesday and Thursday.
For the handicapped, they have elevators,computers for persons with visual disabilities, librarians will assist with retrieval and any other special requests.
.http://library.harvard.edu/med

 

Justin Ide/Harvard Staff Photographer

“Harvard can be a very fast-paced and stressful environment,” said Loise Francisco, a senior research fellow at Harvard Medical School and the owner of Cooper, a 4-year-old Shih Tzu and registered therapy dog which can be checked out from the Countway Library of Medicine.” (Koch, K.,2011)

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/

                                              HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE

The software used is Hollis (Harvard Online Library Information Systems) which is their online database, ALEPH for their cataloging machine which is 11 years old, but its software is updated every year by Ex libris which means from the books. The imagining software is Oasis. There are two Harvard IT techs that maintain the hardware. They do not maintain the website, but they edit it. They have an open source catalog which allows patrons all over the world to be able to access information for free.  Of the 60 computers, one third are renewed every three years. They have both LAN line and WI-FI for both Harvard medical students and guests.  Microfilm readers are still used.  They only have DVD’s and CD’s that come with the books, and they are shelved with the books.

                                                               BUDGET 

Due to the enormous size of the library and it being only one of the many specialty libraries that Harvard University has, it was impossible for Dr. Osterbur to break down the budget. He did however mention due to the economic down turn they had to reduce the librarians to an all time low of 52 for just the Countway Library.