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QuestionPoint will connect U.K. and Australian librarians with medical, health care professionals

Chasing the Sun, a consortium of 20 libraries in the United Kingdom and Australia, will use QuestionPoint to support the urgent, after-hours information needs of health care professionals. The new virutal reference service will launch later this summer and provide assistance with database searching and information retrieval related to critical patient care that cannot wait until the library is open.

The consortium is composed of libraries from the South Australian Human Services Libraries Consortium and the SouthWest Region of the National Health Service and the Royal Free Hospital in London. View this slide show about Chasing the Sun to learn more about the project.

Chasing the Sun slide show
QuestionPoint

Trust is a key advantage for libraries

In “Emerging Issues in Library Web Collections,” Raymond D. Irwin says that libraries are admired, respected and trusted. They are also perceived to provide information in a fair and unbiased way. Users of library Web collections should be reminded that no political or social agenda underlies items selected and, in most cases, no commercial interest either. To avoid being perceived as irrelevant, libraries should leverage this position of trust in the minds of the public and emphasize their proud tradition as trustworthy stewards of organized information.

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New York Public Library is a document supplier for PAIS Archive, PAIS International

OCLC PAIS has reached an agreement with the New York Public Library to provide links to NYPL Express from both the PAIS Archive and PAIS International databases.

NYPL Express, a document delivery service, offers photocopies of newspaper and journal articles, patents, proceedings, government documents, reports and book excerpts using the renowned collections of the New York Public Library and the vast resources of research centers linked with the library throughout the world.

PAIS International and the PAIS Archive, premier global public policy resource databases, are produced by OCLC Public Affairs Information Service. The databases are used primarily by students, academics, scholars, researchers, government officials, the business and financial community, and others seeking to locate published information in the realm of public policy and world politics.

Announcement
NYPL Express Web site

OCLC welcomes the following new member libraries

Minnesota State Community and Technical College-Detroit Lakes
Location: Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, USA
OCLC Symbol: MNXPX
OCLC Network: MINITEX

Northland Community & Technical College-East Grand Forks
Location: East Grand Forks, Minnesota, USA
OCLC Symbol: MNXPY
OCLC Network: MINITEX

Ministry of Public Administration and Information
Location: Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago
OCLC Symbol: MOPAI
OCLC Network: OCLC Latin America and the Caribbean

Membership guidelines and protocols

WorldCat update

Every 12 seconds an OCLC member library adds a new record to WorldCat, which contains more than 56 million records representing 929,999,520 holding locations as of July 31, 2004. Every 4 seconds an OCLC member library fills an interlibrary loan request using WorldCat, which has supported 137,229,178 interlibrary loan requests as of July 31, 2004. A library user searches WorldCat using the OCLC FirstSearch service every second.

See the latest WorldCat record

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