The Countway Library of Medicine is one of the largest medical libraries in the world. It serves the Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, Boston Medical Library and the Massachusetts Medical Society.

Today I got an email from one of my lists mentioning Countway getting rid of MDConsult. Dropping MDConsult is pretty big news here in medical library land, but I think the bigger news is the Countway Library's entire news for the three months of July through September. Their news indicates a serious re-organization of electronic resources.

• July 16, Countway cancelled their Ovid Medline.
• August 5 they cancelled MDConsult.
• August 9 they explained they have conducted a serials usage assessment.
• September 19 will end their trial period (and not purchase) UpToDate.

I think this really goes to show that libraries are asked to provide more and more services for the same or less money. No library is immune. Some smaller less well known libraries are feeling the pinch and have to make similar decisions with different resouces.

At our library we started a similar but less controversial and less extensive re-organization of resources. As I mentioned in earlier blogs we eliminated 3/4 of our Ovid budget by cancelling our access to Ovid's Core Collections. Almost every journal in their Core Collections were duplicated in other provider collections or we had direct access to them. The only big journal we received online through Ovid that had no duplication was Science (embargoed 6 months). With the substantial Ovid savings we were able to afford Science (not embargoed). If you would have asked us 2 years ago for us to cut the Core Collections we would have thought the sky was falling, but technology has changed substantially in 2 years allowing us to get what we previously couldn't online.

We are not ready to pull the plug on MDConult. It is too popular right now. We too are unhappy with MDConsult's search interface, lack of PDF articles, etc. However, as we all know a lot can happen in 1-2 years. MDConsult either gets their act together or our physicians will be wooed by the next latest thing.

We have not cancelled UpToDate. While I think it is not an ideal product by any stretch of the imagination our physicians think it is the next best thing to sliced bread. So while it costs more than my two cars combined, at least it gets used.

Our library is in the midst of doing an extensive journal usage survey. We are at the beginning of studying print usage. We will then add electronic usage statistics to determine if there are any journals that we need to cancell the print but keep the electronic. We will also be starting a small library contact project. Our idea is to start with two departments within our library (that we already have good contacts with) and get journal user feedback from them.

I have told you a few of the things we are doing at our library, what are you doing at yours?