Hospital librarians face some unique challenges that academic or other medical librarians may not have to deal with. Often hospital librarians are solo librarians and often their hospitals have some strict Internet and Intranet protocols. This can make creating and maintaining a hospital library page difficult and it can make having a hospital library blog down right frustrating.

However, there are some hospital librarians out there who are looking around the corners and doing things just a little bit differently to get their information out there to users. One example is the St. Louis Children's Hospital Medical Library.

I was out trolling the Internet trying to find good hospital library blog examples and ran accross SLCH Medical Library. Being a native St. Louisian, it caught my eye immediately. St. Louis Children's Hospital Medical Library is affiliated with Washington University Bernard Becker Medical Library and serves the faculty, staff and students at St. Louis Children's Hospital.

Right away I noticed the site was very new and the domain was registered in December 2007. So after a bit more poking around I emailed the librarian contact to find out more information.

This is what I learned:

• The SLCH Medical Library blog was an easy way to have a website for the library that was under the librarian's control and could act as the centralized access and service point for users.
• While the library has a web page on the hospital's Intranet, the librarian had no control over it or its content and despite several requests, information was not being updated on it.
• Technically the librarian is using a blog format, but she refers to it as the library's website. The concept of a "blog" is kind of new to the majority of the user population and she suspects the term might put them off to the idea.
• Washington University's Becker Library bought the domain for the blog (notice the SLCH's URL is different from SLCH Medical Library and Becker Medical Library).
• The librarian got permission from hospital adminstration to start the blog and use the SLCH Medical Library name. In addition they provided a link to it on their clinical services portal. However, the hospital does not provide server space or any help to manage, maintain, or fund it.
• In addition to regular links and contact information on the site. The librarian included an RSS PubMed feed for SLCH affiliated publications.
• The librarian mentioned two thoughts for the future. One is to get the library page as a desktop icon on all of the hospital computers (she is collaborating with hospital tech folks on that). Two, while her user population might not be hip to term "blog" she knows that her residents are interested in an online journal club and she believes this would be the perfect format for it.

I think this is a really neat example of how a hospital librarian was able to work around and within the system at the same time. I applaud Becker Medical Library for funding the domain name registration and hosting. That amount of money may not have been a large sum for Becker, but it allowed the librarian to have a site. There happens to be many sites that will register domain names and host sites for a very nominal fee (as little as $7-10/month). So for $120/year (less than the price of many medical texts) a library could get a domain name and hosting.

So you see, it can be done, you can have an online site. It may take some time, but when more and more business is done online, having a usable site is extremely important.