I was talking with another hospital librarian about databases and we got on the subject of IP validation. Ideally it is the easiest and best way (that I know of) to give our users access to the library's online databases. While on campus librarians and users don't have to worry about user names and passwords.

This librarian belonged to a hospital within a system that through the years acquired/assimilated various other smaller hospitals. In their quest to make every hospital a part of the whole system they made it so all of the hospitals share a range of IP addresses. There are five hospitals (each with their own library) in the system and all of them share the same range of IP addresses. There is no way to say range X belongs to hospital X and range Y belongs to hospital Y. According to the librarian, users from hospitals V,W,X,Y,Z are all coming from IP Range A.

According to the librarian, when she wants to subscribe to an electronic database or journal she must get four other librarians to agree and PAY for the resource. It is an all or nothing endeavor. The databases do not want to provide free access to the other hospitals/libraries, who won't or can't pay for access. This has made the process of getting electronic resources laborious and frustrating. The problem intensifies when there is a database like UpToDate that everybody wants but not every hospital is able and willing to pay for. The librarian must then explain to her patrons that she can not get access to the product because the other hospitals do not want it and because of the way IT set up the network she can not buy it only for her institution.

Try as she might she can not convince IT to fix the problem because according to her IT people it will cost too much time and money. So she is unable to build her library to the best of her ability and acquire wanted electronic resources.

I have got to believe that this is not completely unique among hospital libraries. What are other hospitals in this situation doing to provide electronic resources? How do they impress up on their large IT departments true enormity of the problem? In a system with 5 hospitals and thousands of employees how can one voice (or five librarian voices) be heard? What is the most effective way to make ones voice be heard without running into the brick wall of hospital IT bureaucracy?