Another medical librarian and I were talking the other day and she was complaining about how her hospital has blocked all web mail. No Yahoo mail, no Hotmail, no AOL, and of course no Gmail. She finds its absolutely frustrating to explain to patients and their families that there is no way for them to access their email to update their friends and family on the patient's progress. Equally frustrating is that there are visiting doctors and lecturers who come to her library asking to get on web mail and she again must explain that the hospital denies all access to web mail. She feels frustrated and powerless. She has begged IT to consider some sort of compromise and she has even spoken to the Chief Administrator of the Hospital. Each time she is denied because IT explains that they get the majority of their virus problems through these type of accounts. This hospital is in a major city and well regarded, yet patients and visitors are denied web mail access. But here is the kicker, this hospital is a part of a larger hospital system and the main hospital allows web mail access in their library. Even when she explains this her IT people request is denied.

What can be frustrating to some hospital librarians is to see how public and academic librarians have the freedom to explore creative ways to provide services to their users, but because many hospital librarians are at the mercy of their IT department's restrictive policies they feel like they are playing catch up just to provide basic services like web mail.

Heck, don't forget my post about the librarian who discovered that her hospital shared IP addresses with three other hospitals within her system. 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 been battling my IT department to get permission to create my own intranet web pages. Currently I am forced to "create" (I use that term very loosely) the library's intranet pages using pre-approved cookie cutter pages from the hospital's Microsoft Content Management Server templates. BLAH!!!!!! I can not create any search boxes (for patrons to search the library pages), I can not do any HTML coding (to fix problematic quirks), I can not provide a medical news blog on the library's pages, and I can not create online forms for patrons to order searches/articles. Basically it is like a glorified bulletin board which I can post some links and text.

It seems we all want to provide great service but are handcuffed within our own hospital's IT departments. We try to bang the drum and get their attention but it falls on deaf ears. These librarians are almost in a Catch-22 situation. They are told by everyone including MLA to be up to date, be relevant, be innovative, get what their users need, or you risk losing the library. But when you are restricted like this (despite your best efforts) what do you do?

How many other hospital libraries have these same problems, or are these just some isolated cases? After all, how frustrating is it to learn from MLA about RSS and how to create blogs when your hospital prohibits you from even creating a web page?!