Biomedical Periodicals in Nigerian Medical Libraries: The Medical Librarian's Dilemma BY ALPHONSO 0. OKWUOWULU, Librarian University of Nigeria Medical Library Enugu, Nigeria ABSTRACT The Nigerian medical librarian has an uphill task in his effort to satisfy the journal needs of users of his library. His problems stem from difficulties in the selection and acquisition of journals, delay in postal services, budgetary and other administrative controls, and the changing nature of medical education and health-care services in Nigeria. The librarian's attempts to solve these problems include increased subscriptions to journals and use of interlibrary loans, but the absence of union lists of holdings of other libraries, the heavy cost of photocopying services, and poor postal facilities present another dimension to his problems. Eventually his best solution seems to lie in the establishment of a national center for "least used" journals to serve as a source stock for the country's medical libraries.
THE absence of well-developed libraries creates enormous problems for librarians in developing countries in their efforts to satisfy the needs of their readers. Perhaps the worst hit are librarians in special libraries, where the scope and depth of information sought are usually well beyond what the library can attempt to provide from its resources. As a result of emphasis in some areas of development, certain groups of special libraries in these countries come under greater pressure than others. In Nigeria major emphasis has been placed on health and education but the country at the moment has only seven major medical libraries. The oldest of them, Yaba Central Medical Library, has only thirty years of history and the youngest (Nigerian Medical Council Library) was established only three years ago. Five of the libraries are attached to university institutions, namely, Ibadan, Lagos, Nsukka, Benin, and Ahmadu Bello universities, and with the exception of Ibadan University Medical Library, which was established in 1948, the rest came into existence between 1962 and 1972. The libraries serve not only their faculties or colleges of medicine but also their university teaching hospitals and other bona fide medical and paramedical personnel in their communities. Thus Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 64(3)July 1976
the Nigerian medical library as represented by the university medical libraries attempts to serve a readership that extends beyond the boundaries of its parent institution, a readership that has varied interests as well. The nature of their needs plays a significant role in the library's selection and acquisition policy but very often these patrons come into the library fully convinced that they will find whatever materials they need, and if they fail to do so they leave the library with the impression that the librarian is inefficient and unresourceful. Of course the libraries have only books and journals to offer; audiovisual items such as videotapes, filmstrips, slides, and cassette tapes are virtually nonexistent. The journals more than the books present the greatest amount of problems.
SELECTION PROBLEMS Many of the problems encountered by the Nigerian medical librarian in providing the journals needed by his library users can be attributed to poor methods of selection and difficulties in the acquisition of the periodical titles. For selection, the librarian usually relies heavily on the senior patrons of the library (members of the teaching staff) for the titles he subscribes to, in the belief that the process of selection of library literature is best done by specialists in the subject field, and he is not one [1]. This view is openly supported by the teaching staff and other professionals who believe that by their training they are subject specialists and therefore should have exclusive right in selecting the literature in their fields. They send in their recommendations from time to time and the titles are ordered as soon as a good number of recommendations have been received. Their selections are in many cases based on their past experiences: they invariably recommend the periodical titles they have known from their college days. This seems to be their major criterion in assessing the merits of the journals they recommend. A more balanced stock would be achieved if selections could be based on an objective method such as 305
ALPHONSO 0. OKWUOWULU
"ranking," in which periodicals are assessed on the number of articles they contribute to their particular subject fields over a period of time. In this method the journal that contributes most ranks highest. Apart from the poor selection method, there is no systematic method for receiving recommendations from the patrons, and no serious attempt is made by them to review the stock and recommend titles that are considered useful additions to the library. More often than not the reader sends in his suggestion only after he has failed to get a particular article in the library, and the library is lucky if his recommendation is not too specialised to be of use to a majority of its users. On the whole, the librarian's primary responsibility seems to be to collate the recommendations and send out orders. However, he supplements the list with his own recommendations based on the traditional methods-relying on the holdings of other libraries, reputation of the publisher, title appeal, and reviews in trade bibliographies and journals. AcQuISITION PROBLEMS The acquisition of the titles selected raises its own problems too. Most libraries in the world are unable to purchase all the journals they need and medical libraries in Nigeria are notorious in this respect [2]. Tight budgetary and administrative controls from the main university libraries give them little elbow room in the acquisition of the materials they need. Although some of them have their own book votes, they operate within the general framework of their university library systems. Thus the librarian acquires only the number of journals his budget and instructions from his authorities permit, and these are usually very few compared to the needs of his readers [3]. In order to cover the needs of the widest cross section of his community he ends up with only a few journals in each branch of medicine, and his stock is grossly inadequate [4]. Another problem associated with acquisition is the delay in the receipt of the journals from publishers. Almost all the journals in a Nigerian medical library's core collection are published outside the country. They have to be ordered from their overseas publishers through book dealers such as F. A. Faxon, Blackwells, or Swets & Zeitlinger, and orders take as long as four to six months to be serviced. Sometimes further delay is caused from the book dealer's end if the details in the order slip are questionable. Meanwhile the patron has to wait, and he is lucky if he reads an
306
article in a journal earlier than twelve weeks after publication date. The many weeks' interval between the despatch of the orders and the receipt of the journals in the library is primarily caused by delay in transportation. The copies are sent by surface mail from the publishers, as air freight would raise the total cost of the subscriptions far out of proportion to the library's budget for journals. The poor postal services in the country do not help matters either; letters take between six and eight days to travel from Lagos to Enugu, a distance of only 400 miles. Sometimes the journals are lost in transit, thus necessitating reordering and further delay. The delay in receiving the journals also bothers the librarian from another angle: he is unable to claim missing issues of journals from publishers free of charge because the publishers demand that claims must be made within sixty to ninety days of the date of publication. Journals from the United States of America and Europe would not have arrived in Nigeria before the expiration of this period of grace and a great majority of journals in Nigerian medical libraries come from these two areas. This means that by the time the librarian realises that a particular issue of a journal has not been received in his library it is already too late to put in a claim. The unfortunate effect of this is that gaps frequently occur in the collection. With these gaps it becomes impossible to bind the journals, and readers are tempted to remove single issues from the library, more easily done than removing bound volumes. When a particular issue of a journal on subscription is not received, the librarian has the added burden of placing an order for a single copy to complete his runs, and he is not even sure of obtaining the copy from the publisher. In some cases, after an order has gone out the "missing" issue arrives after spending many months in the post. For every missing copy the librarian reorders he is overpaying the normal subscription by the amount he pays for such a single copy, and he is not refunded for the missing copy by either the publisher or the book dealer. An effort to claim a missing copy usually ends up in a form letter from the dealer saying, "Publisher reports journal despatched on.... Please check your mails." The delay associated with the receipt of journals is not unique with overseas publishers only. A few biomedical periodicals published in Nigeria, such as the Nigerian Medical Journal, West African Medical Journal, Journal of the Society of Health of Nigeria, The Nigerian Nurse, Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 64(3)July 1976
PERIODICALS IN NIGERIAN LIBRARIES
etc., are even more difficult to obtain from the publishers than journals from abroad. It is common knowledge that orders sent to these publishers or their printers are never attended to, or at best serviced after many months of delay. For example, all the issues of the Nigerian Medical Journal received in the University of Nigeria Medical Library, Enugu, between 1972 and 1975, came in as gifts while the paid subscription was never supplied despite repeated orders sent to the publishers. A solution to this problem has yet to be found, and the lack of competent book dealers in the country makes matters worse for the librarian, who must then place his orders direct with the printers or publishers of the journals. The organizational structure of the Nigerian university medical libraries also presents a serious problem to the acquisition process. Most of the libraries come under the direct control of the main university libraries, in which acquisition is a centralized process. In some of the systems, for example, the University of Ibadan and the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, the central acquisitions department is located a good distance away from the university's medical library. In the University of Nigeria library system a distance of forty-five miles on very bad roads separates the medical library (at Enugu campus of the university) from the acquisitions/orders department (at Nsukka). In such circumstances it is not unusual that orders from branch libraries are not given as prompt attention as they deserve at the center. This initial delay in the dispatch of orders adds to the total delay in the receipt of the materials required. In addition, suggestions are often required to be routed through the heads of departments of the suggesters, and when this happens an extra step in the delay process is introduced. Again, the nature of medical education in Nigeria contributes to the library's apparent inability to provide adequate reading materials for its readers. At the moment, medical education in the country is yet in its formative stage, and this keeps both the curriculum and the syllabus very fluid. As new courses become introduced, the demand for journals not previously subscribed to by the library arises. Prior information is not normally given to the librarian to provide these journals well in advance of the beginning of the courses. Very often recommendations for the journals are received only after the courses have begun and the teachers have discovered that their subjects of interest are not represented in the collection. This adds fresh tension to the already overstretched Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 64(3)July 1976
budget, and more often than not leads to delay in the acquisition of these items because it may well be that such new additions can only be made by dropping some other journal already on subscription, or alternatively, by waiting for a new budget. Either way, a delay is inevitable. However, if the suggestion comes from the dean of the college or any other member of the college board of governors the librarian is helpless. He must act promptly, poor finances notwithstanding. INTERLIBRARY LOAN PROBLEMS The librarian's problems are not confined to mere selection and acquisition of journal titles. Patrons often come into the library with requests or recommendations for specific articles in journals not held by the library. The choice open to the librarian in such a case is interlibrary loan of the physical volume or a photocopy of the article from some other library in Nigeria or abroad. One would expect the choice for a source library in interlibrary loan transactions to be one of the Nigerian libraries, but the major problem here is that up-to-date lists of biomedical serials held in Nigerian libraries are not available and the absence of such lists makes the location of an item in any of the medical libraries in the country very difficult [5, 6]. The latest list, and the only one yet available for the medical libraries, is the one compiled by Reynolds in 1964, when only three medical libraries existed in the country [7]. There are not very many indexes and abstracts in the libraries, either, and the absence of these makes literature searches extremely difficult; very often the librarian resorts to the NLM MEDLINE service by post or the printout from WHO MEDLARS center in Geneva. If the librarian finally decides to send for a photocopy of an article, he meets with the problem of who pays the cost-the patron or the library? (Photocopies cost as much as 10k or approximately l6¢ per page for library materials in Nigeria). Here the main consideration is that the reader is entitled to a service, the journal, which the library has not provided through no particular fault of his. Would it be fair to penalize him for this deficiency in the library? Practice varies from library to library. Some libraries, for instance, the University of Nigeria Medical Library, assume full responsibility for providing photocopies of all articles from other libraries free of charge to the reader, if such articles are required for teaching or research purposes. Others would send for the arti-
307
ALPHONSO 0. OKWUOWULU
cles but make the readers pay for them instead. In some libraries the copies are retained by the library after paying for them but it has been found that they serve little or no use because they are hardly ever requested by another reader. The cost is not the only problem associated with the photocopies as a means of satisfying readers' requests. By far the greatest handicap is the delay involved in getting the copies from the source library. It takes as long as four to six weeks to get a copy, especially if it has to come from a library not within the country. This is not to say that services from libraries within the country are fast by any stretch of imagination. Indeed, instances have been recorded when photocopies from libraries outside Nigeria, such as the British Lending Library for Science and Technology, Boston Spa, and the NLM, are received quicker than copies from some libraries within the country [8]. There are occasions when prints are lost in transit and this necessitates reordering and further loss of time. As a general rule, Nigerian medical libraries request prints from sources considered fastest in service. In this regard the NLM, the BLL, and the RSM (Royal Society of Medicine Library, London) outscore other sources. Materials from continental Europe, especially eastern European libraries, take the longest time to arrive. A minimum time interval of eight weeks is normal. An impatient patron is prone to feel that the library is no use and the librarian grossly incompetent if he cannot procure a required article in a matter of days. The distance between his library and the publisher (for regular acquisition) or the lending library (for interlibrary loan or photocopies) does not mean much to him, and poor postal services are not sufficient to explain away the delay in satisfying his request. THE WAY OUT Every effort made by the Nigerian medical librarian to satisfy the needs of his library users has been frustrated by forces within his library (poor and inadequate stock), and forces without (delays in receipt of items ordered). The solution may well lie in subscribing to all the journals that his library needs. This is, however, not practicable, because even if he had all the funds he would require to carry out such a gigantic project, he would not know at any particular time all the journals that
308
would publish articles likely to be of interest to his readers. Secondly, he would not be able to anticipate new journals that might come onto the market. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, even the greatest of libraries cannot purchase all the journals it needs for its services [9]. Again, the frequent changes in the Nigerian medical school curriculum occasioned by the introduction of new courses makes it difficult for the librarian to anticipate what would be required in the future. In the final analysis, his best solution would be to acquire a core list of journals for his library and then cooperate with other medical libraries in the country in setting up a regional or national center for "least used" journals [10]. A list of serials in each library should be available to every other library as well as to the center. The center would then serve as a source for journals not available in the cooperating libraries, and the libraries could send their requests to it whenever need arose. All things being equal, the problem of delay in the receipt of photocopies would thus be minimized, but the delay in receiving journals from publishers would of course remain unsolved until transportation and postal services improved or a new method of mailing the journals to their destinations is invented. REFERENCES 1. LAWANI, S. M. Towards objective methods of selecting periodical titles. Nigerian Libr. 7: 21-26, Apr., Aug. 1971. 2. AMosu, M. Medical library development at the
University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 62: 49-51, Jan. 1974. 3. BELLEH, G. S. Medical librarianship in Nigeria: a review of the literature and comments on some problems and prospects. Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 63: 199-207, Apr. 1975. 4. AMosu, M. Op. cit. 5. Ibid. 6. OLUWAKUYIDE, A. An examination of Nigerian medical library service and problems. Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 60: 315-318, Apr. 1972. 7. REYNOLDS, C. F. Union list of biomedical serials in selected libraries in Nigeria. Ibadan, 1964 (Typescript). 8. SERIKI, T. A. B. Problems of interlibrary cooperation among Nigerian medical libraries. Spec. Libr. 64: 566-570, Dec. 1973. 9. CROSBY, T. K. Obtaining literature through interlibrary loan. New Zealand Libr. 36: 333-338, Oct. 1973. 10. Ibid.
Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 64(3)July 1976
THE absence of well-developed libraries creates enormous problems for librarians in developing countries in their efforts to satisfy the needs of their readers. Perhaps the worst hit are librarians in special libraries, where the scope and depth of information sought are usually well beyond what the library can attempt to provide from its resources. As a result of emphasis in some areas of development, certain groups of special libraries in these countries come under greater pressure than others. In Nigeria major emphasis has been placed on health and education but the country at the moment has only seven major medical libraries. The oldest of them, Yaba Central Medical Library, has only thirty years of history and the youngest (Nigerian Medical Council Library) was established only three years ago. Five of the libraries are attached to university institutions, namely, Ibadan, Lagos, Nsukka, Benin, and Ahmadu Bello universities, and with the exception of Ibadan University Medical Library, which was established in 1948, the rest came into existence between 1962 and 1972. The libraries serve not only their faculties or colleges of medicine but also their university teaching hospitals and other bona fide medical and paramedical personnel in their communities. Thus Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 64(3)July 1976
the Nigerian medical library as represented by the university medical libraries attempts to serve a readership that extends beyond the boundaries of its parent institution, a readership that has varied interests as well. The nature of their needs plays a significant role in the library's selection and acquisition policy but very often these patrons come into the library fully convinced that they will find whatever materials they need, and if they fail to do so they leave the library with the impression that the librarian is inefficient and unresourceful. Of course the libraries have only books and journals to offer; audiovisual items such as videotapes, filmstrips, slides, and cassette tapes are virtually nonexistent. The journals more than the books present the greatest amount of problems.
SELECTION PROBLEMS Many of the problems encountered by the Nigerian medical librarian in providing the journals needed by his library users can be attributed to poor methods of selection and difficulties in the acquisition of the periodical titles. For selection, the librarian usually relies heavily on the senior patrons of the library (members of the teaching staff) for the titles he subscribes to, in the belief that the process of selection of library literature is best done by specialists in the subject field, and he is not one [1]. This view is openly supported by the teaching staff and other professionals who believe that by their training they are subject specialists and therefore should have exclusive right in selecting the literature in their fields. They send in their recommendations from time to time and the titles are ordered as soon as a good number of recommendations have been received. Their selections are in many cases based on their past experiences: they invariably recommend the periodical titles they have known from their college days. This seems to be their major criterion in assessing the merits of the journals they recommend. A more balanced stock would be achieved if selections could be based on an objective method such as 305
ALPHONSO 0. OKWUOWULU
"ranking," in which periodicals are assessed on the number of articles they contribute to their particular subject fields over a period of time. In this method the journal that contributes most ranks highest. Apart from the poor selection method, there is no systematic method for receiving recommendations from the patrons, and no serious attempt is made by them to review the stock and recommend titles that are considered useful additions to the library. More often than not the reader sends in his suggestion only after he has failed to get a particular article in the library, and the library is lucky if his recommendation is not too specialised to be of use to a majority of its users. On the whole, the librarian's primary responsibility seems to be to collate the recommendations and send out orders. However, he supplements the list with his own recommendations based on the traditional methods-relying on the holdings of other libraries, reputation of the publisher, title appeal, and reviews in trade bibliographies and journals. AcQuISITION PROBLEMS The acquisition of the titles selected raises its own problems too. Most libraries in the world are unable to purchase all the journals they need and medical libraries in Nigeria are notorious in this respect [2]. Tight budgetary and administrative controls from the main university libraries give them little elbow room in the acquisition of the materials they need. Although some of them have their own book votes, they operate within the general framework of their university library systems. Thus the librarian acquires only the number of journals his budget and instructions from his authorities permit, and these are usually very few compared to the needs of his readers [3]. In order to cover the needs of the widest cross section of his community he ends up with only a few journals in each branch of medicine, and his stock is grossly inadequate [4]. Another problem associated with acquisition is the delay in the receipt of the journals from publishers. Almost all the journals in a Nigerian medical library's core collection are published outside the country. They have to be ordered from their overseas publishers through book dealers such as F. A. Faxon, Blackwells, or Swets & Zeitlinger, and orders take as long as four to six months to be serviced. Sometimes further delay is caused from the book dealer's end if the details in the order slip are questionable. Meanwhile the patron has to wait, and he is lucky if he reads an
306
article in a journal earlier than twelve weeks after publication date. The many weeks' interval between the despatch of the orders and the receipt of the journals in the library is primarily caused by delay in transportation. The copies are sent by surface mail from the publishers, as air freight would raise the total cost of the subscriptions far out of proportion to the library's budget for journals. The poor postal services in the country do not help matters either; letters take between six and eight days to travel from Lagos to Enugu, a distance of only 400 miles. Sometimes the journals are lost in transit, thus necessitating reordering and further delay. The delay in receiving the journals also bothers the librarian from another angle: he is unable to claim missing issues of journals from publishers free of charge because the publishers demand that claims must be made within sixty to ninety days of the date of publication. Journals from the United States of America and Europe would not have arrived in Nigeria before the expiration of this period of grace and a great majority of journals in Nigerian medical libraries come from these two areas. This means that by the time the librarian realises that a particular issue of a journal has not been received in his library it is already too late to put in a claim. The unfortunate effect of this is that gaps frequently occur in the collection. With these gaps it becomes impossible to bind the journals, and readers are tempted to remove single issues from the library, more easily done than removing bound volumes. When a particular issue of a journal on subscription is not received, the librarian has the added burden of placing an order for a single copy to complete his runs, and he is not even sure of obtaining the copy from the publisher. In some cases, after an order has gone out the "missing" issue arrives after spending many months in the post. For every missing copy the librarian reorders he is overpaying the normal subscription by the amount he pays for such a single copy, and he is not refunded for the missing copy by either the publisher or the book dealer. An effort to claim a missing copy usually ends up in a form letter from the dealer saying, "Publisher reports journal despatched on.... Please check your mails." The delay associated with the receipt of journals is not unique with overseas publishers only. A few biomedical periodicals published in Nigeria, such as the Nigerian Medical Journal, West African Medical Journal, Journal of the Society of Health of Nigeria, The Nigerian Nurse, Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 64(3)July 1976
PERIODICALS IN NIGERIAN LIBRARIES
etc., are even more difficult to obtain from the publishers than journals from abroad. It is common knowledge that orders sent to these publishers or their printers are never attended to, or at best serviced after many months of delay. For example, all the issues of the Nigerian Medical Journal received in the University of Nigeria Medical Library, Enugu, between 1972 and 1975, came in as gifts while the paid subscription was never supplied despite repeated orders sent to the publishers. A solution to this problem has yet to be found, and the lack of competent book dealers in the country makes matters worse for the librarian, who must then place his orders direct with the printers or publishers of the journals. The organizational structure of the Nigerian university medical libraries also presents a serious problem to the acquisition process. Most of the libraries come under the direct control of the main university libraries, in which acquisition is a centralized process. In some of the systems, for example, the University of Ibadan and the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, the central acquisitions department is located a good distance away from the university's medical library. In the University of Nigeria library system a distance of forty-five miles on very bad roads separates the medical library (at Enugu campus of the university) from the acquisitions/orders department (at Nsukka). In such circumstances it is not unusual that orders from branch libraries are not given as prompt attention as they deserve at the center. This initial delay in the dispatch of orders adds to the total delay in the receipt of the materials required. In addition, suggestions are often required to be routed through the heads of departments of the suggesters, and when this happens an extra step in the delay process is introduced. Again, the nature of medical education in Nigeria contributes to the library's apparent inability to provide adequate reading materials for its readers. At the moment, medical education in the country is yet in its formative stage, and this keeps both the curriculum and the syllabus very fluid. As new courses become introduced, the demand for journals not previously subscribed to by the library arises. Prior information is not normally given to the librarian to provide these journals well in advance of the beginning of the courses. Very often recommendations for the journals are received only after the courses have begun and the teachers have discovered that their subjects of interest are not represented in the collection. This adds fresh tension to the already overstretched Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 64(3)July 1976
budget, and more often than not leads to delay in the acquisition of these items because it may well be that such new additions can only be made by dropping some other journal already on subscription, or alternatively, by waiting for a new budget. Either way, a delay is inevitable. However, if the suggestion comes from the dean of the college or any other member of the college board of governors the librarian is helpless. He must act promptly, poor finances notwithstanding. INTERLIBRARY LOAN PROBLEMS The librarian's problems are not confined to mere selection and acquisition of journal titles. Patrons often come into the library with requests or recommendations for specific articles in journals not held by the library. The choice open to the librarian in such a case is interlibrary loan of the physical volume or a photocopy of the article from some other library in Nigeria or abroad. One would expect the choice for a source library in interlibrary loan transactions to be one of the Nigerian libraries, but the major problem here is that up-to-date lists of biomedical serials held in Nigerian libraries are not available and the absence of such lists makes the location of an item in any of the medical libraries in the country very difficult [5, 6]. The latest list, and the only one yet available for the medical libraries, is the one compiled by Reynolds in 1964, when only three medical libraries existed in the country [7]. There are not very many indexes and abstracts in the libraries, either, and the absence of these makes literature searches extremely difficult; very often the librarian resorts to the NLM MEDLINE service by post or the printout from WHO MEDLARS center in Geneva. If the librarian finally decides to send for a photocopy of an article, he meets with the problem of who pays the cost-the patron or the library? (Photocopies cost as much as 10k or approximately l6¢ per page for library materials in Nigeria). Here the main consideration is that the reader is entitled to a service, the journal, which the library has not provided through no particular fault of his. Would it be fair to penalize him for this deficiency in the library? Practice varies from library to library. Some libraries, for instance, the University of Nigeria Medical Library, assume full responsibility for providing photocopies of all articles from other libraries free of charge to the reader, if such articles are required for teaching or research purposes. Others would send for the arti-
307
ALPHONSO 0. OKWUOWULU
cles but make the readers pay for them instead. In some libraries the copies are retained by the library after paying for them but it has been found that they serve little or no use because they are hardly ever requested by another reader. The cost is not the only problem associated with the photocopies as a means of satisfying readers' requests. By far the greatest handicap is the delay involved in getting the copies from the source library. It takes as long as four to six weeks to get a copy, especially if it has to come from a library not within the country. This is not to say that services from libraries within the country are fast by any stretch of imagination. Indeed, instances have been recorded when photocopies from libraries outside Nigeria, such as the British Lending Library for Science and Technology, Boston Spa, and the NLM, are received quicker than copies from some libraries within the country [8]. There are occasions when prints are lost in transit and this necessitates reordering and further loss of time. As a general rule, Nigerian medical libraries request prints from sources considered fastest in service. In this regard the NLM, the BLL, and the RSM (Royal Society of Medicine Library, London) outscore other sources. Materials from continental Europe, especially eastern European libraries, take the longest time to arrive. A minimum time interval of eight weeks is normal. An impatient patron is prone to feel that the library is no use and the librarian grossly incompetent if he cannot procure a required article in a matter of days. The distance between his library and the publisher (for regular acquisition) or the lending library (for interlibrary loan or photocopies) does not mean much to him, and poor postal services are not sufficient to explain away the delay in satisfying his request. THE WAY OUT Every effort made by the Nigerian medical librarian to satisfy the needs of his library users has been frustrated by forces within his library (poor and inadequate stock), and forces without (delays in receipt of items ordered). The solution may well lie in subscribing to all the journals that his library needs. This is, however, not practicable, because even if he had all the funds he would require to carry out such a gigantic project, he would not know at any particular time all the journals that
308
would publish articles likely to be of interest to his readers. Secondly, he would not be able to anticipate new journals that might come onto the market. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, even the greatest of libraries cannot purchase all the journals it needs for its services [9]. Again, the frequent changes in the Nigerian medical school curriculum occasioned by the introduction of new courses makes it difficult for the librarian to anticipate what would be required in the future. In the final analysis, his best solution would be to acquire a core list of journals for his library and then cooperate with other medical libraries in the country in setting up a regional or national center for "least used" journals [10]. A list of serials in each library should be available to every other library as well as to the center. The center would then serve as a source for journals not available in the cooperating libraries, and the libraries could send their requests to it whenever need arose. All things being equal, the problem of delay in the receipt of photocopies would thus be minimized, but the delay in receiving journals from publishers would of course remain unsolved until transportation and postal services improved or a new method of mailing the journals to their destinations is invented. REFERENCES 1. LAWANI, S. M. Towards objective methods of selecting periodical titles. Nigerian Libr. 7: 21-26, Apr., Aug. 1971. 2. AMosu, M. Medical library development at the
University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 62: 49-51, Jan. 1974. 3. BELLEH, G. S. Medical librarianship in Nigeria: a review of the literature and comments on some problems and prospects. Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 63: 199-207, Apr. 1975. 4. AMosu, M. Op. cit. 5. Ibid. 6. OLUWAKUYIDE, A. An examination of Nigerian medical library service and problems. Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 60: 315-318, Apr. 1972. 7. REYNOLDS, C. F. Union list of biomedical serials in selected libraries in Nigeria. Ibadan, 1964 (Typescript). 8. SERIKI, T. A. B. Problems of interlibrary cooperation among Nigerian medical libraries. Spec. Libr. 64: 566-570, Dec. 1973. 9. CROSBY, T. K. Obtaining literature through interlibrary loan. New Zealand Libr. 36: 333-338, Oct. 1973. 10. Ibid.
Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 64(3)July 1976
