Yesterday I was in Charleston, SC for the SC/MLA Conference. I was one of the reaction panelists to George Needham's lecture where he discussed OCLC's environmental scan and perceptions report.
As I sat and listened to George speak, one thing get percolating in my mind. Hospital libraries must break free and get online in order to survive. Your users will sooner go to Google than walk to your library. An ever growing group of users are more willing to text message a friend for help than pick up the phone to call you. Finally, if you do not have an Internet web page (with your resources listed) your users will jump on to Google rather than take the time to get in the car, drive to the hospital, and stalk somebody for a parking spot just to go to your library. In the past patrons valued quality over time. According to the OCLC's perception report people now view time as more important over quality. People are willing to deal with just good enough if it saves them precious time. Perhaps it is because the margin between the quality of good information and ok information has narrowed. Perhaps we, as a society perception of quality has changed. Who knows. As hospital librarians we know that the information we give our patrons is good and it helps save lives, and the idea that our patrons are settling for ok information when somebody's life is involved disturbs us. But the fact is that this happens and we face losing users as a result.
I feel it is more important than ever for hospital libraries to get online and to be as available as possible to our users. To me that means increasing your online presence. Hospital libraries in the past have had problems getting an online presence. Today, there are too many opportunities and resources not to have online presence.

Get a Library Internet Page:

• Patiently pester your IT department for you to get a page where you can link to your resources. -Cost: Free, but it might be very time consuming frustrating to get IT's permission.
• If your IT department consistently says no and your sanity has taken a beating, consider outside companies. LISHost, as well as many other Internet hosting companies will host your website on their servers. If you think your hospital is going to have a problem with their name/brand being on a site that is not their own then use this as an opportunity to again try get them to give you a page on the hospital site. -Cost: Some places like LISHost are only $10/month. If your budget is tight, think of not buying one or two books.
• Partner with another hospital library within your system that has more lenient policies. Ask the library if they would be willing to help you host a small page with your resources. You could really run with this idea and become consortia libraries sharing book collections and some resources. -Cost: Free, but it could be time consuming but the opportunities could be big.

Abandon Multiple Password Access:
Stop the multiple password madness. We already have way too many usernames, passwords, pins, security codes, etc. in our personal lives. We do not need to be bothered with trying to remember or keeping pages of usernames and passwords to multiple library resources. Plain ol' Google does not ask you for a password.

If you haven't heard of Athens Eduserv as a method to provide single sign on access to multiple library resources using ONLY one username and password, then you have been living in a cave and not reading my blog. Hospital libraries are usually prohibited from providing proxy access to their intranet page which is where they usually list all of their online resources. Athens frees libraries from this problem.

Cost: Call Athens for specific information, pricing depends on the number of users you put in the database but many small hospital libraries can get it for around $1500. If you think that is pricey, think of it this way, I would be willing to bet you could get 150 users to pay you $10/year for online access to your resources. I am not advocating charging your users, but I have used this example to explain the cost to my administrators. Almost everybody understands how much home Internet access costs, and it is way more than $10/year. I found by breaking it down to something my administrators could relate to, they were more willing to give me the money.

Get Your Resources Online:
I am amazed by libraries that still have card catalogs. Heck, I know of one library serving three hospitals that keeps track of their book collection using a three ring binder! Please tell me how this serves the users. Even my 5 year old son expects to find library books on the computer, and he can't even spell.

There are many online ASP hosted ILS systems for hospital libraries. (ASP hosted means you don't have to deal with maintenance or hardware, you just input your records). Some very reasonable well known ones are CyberTools for Libraries and EOS.

What good is it to have online journal but not to have it listed anywhere. Journals, particularly online journals are a beast that can cause you to go bald way before genetics intended. However, you can at least tame them into submission and get what you deserve from them. There are many journals that offer online access free with a print subscription. If you have not activated these free with print online journals, it is like you are throwing away free money. If you subscribe to a product like MDConsult which provides online access to a number of journals, and you don't have these journals listed in some way on your site, then you are wasting your subscription money. If you have a really tight budget create your own library A-Z list of online journals, but that can be time consuming with journal links always changing. If you can scrape together a little money it really behooves you to look at something like EBSCO's A-Z list which will maintain and organize all of the links. Their LinkSource product which provides access points to the full text within databases is ideal. However, it might be too costly for some libraries to get provide.

Time and People:
You don't have the time nor the staff to do these things? I hate to say it, but you need to make the time and find the people. Get volunteers. Get library schools students to do it for their practicum. Put the word out to your local library schools that you need library students for these projects. You will get people who will come to you to get experience. If you don't have a library school nearby, contact the library schools that offer online distance education. Who knows perhaps there is a student in your area who is attending an online school who need experience.

No matter how big or how small your library is, you will always have people who are unaware of your services. Your goal is to make that number as small as possible and be relevant to their needs.