Foundation funds Yapese hospital’s medical library

On the tiny island of Yap in the far western Pacific, a new medical library has been created to replace the one destroyed by Typhoon Sudal in 2004.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the nation’s largest philanthropy devoted exclusively to improving the health and health care of all people, worked with Guam’s Ayuda Foundation to fund a project to establish this new Yap State Hospital Medical Library.

Librarians Arlene Cohen and Alice Hadley of Guam worked with Drs. Mark Durand and Thane Hancock, Medical Library Manager Charlene Laamtal and Daisy Gilmatam, the information technology technician at Yap State Hospital, to create this new facility.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant covered the purchase of 250 books, cataloging for the books, library management software, a PowerPoint projector and screen, three computers, two printers, as well as the construction of bookcases and computer desks. Richard Sher of Gaylord, a library supply company, donated a two-drawer catalog and various library supplies to get the project started.

The project originated when Dr. Durand from Yap State Hospital contacted the Ayuda Foundation in Guam about replacing their typhoon damaged library in late 2005. Carlotta Leon Guerrero, executive director of Ayuda, contacted Arlene Cohen, a librarian for over 20 years at the University of Guam, who has worked on library resource sharing and development in Micronesia.

Cohen brought in Alice Hadley, medical librarian at the United States Naval Hospital, Guam, to provide her expertise in small medical libraries. The original grant application was sent to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 2006. After a few rounds of tweaking and revising, the funds were made available in December 2007 for the Yap State Hospital Medical Library.

“We immediately began purchasing books and computers and arranging their shipment from the continental United States to Colonia, Yap State, in the Federated States of Micronesia,” said Leon Guerrero.

Although the FSM is a foreign country, it is also a freely associated state with the United States. Consequently, the U.S. dollar is the currency and the U.S. Postal Service costs are the same as shipping to Hawaii (although much slower). Shipping difficulties abound, as large companies have rigid requirements when shipping to a foreign country. Their postal systems often cannot provide the customs paperwork needed when utilizing the United States Postal Service and/or do not even allow the use of the system. This required special handling, adding 20 percent to the shipping cost.

“Originally, it was planned to send all books in January by surface mail, anticipating shipping time of two or three months (or more) to reach Yap; our trip was scheduled for the first week of April. However, the only shipping allowed to international locations, by the U.S. book vendor Majors, was the use of an air courier service; the books, therefore, arrived well ahead of our trip,” said Leon Guerrero.

During the first week of April, Cohen and Hadley traveled to Yap to help install the medical library. While there, they assisted in setting up the actual physical library, a card catalog, and an online catalog; providing training to the library manager on using the library management software and operation of an up-to-the-minute library. Training was also presented to almost one-third of the hospital staff on using PubMed and accessing quality health information in the physical library as well as the Internet. They plan to return in November 2008 to provide follow up training for the library manager, and additional staff training on using PubMed and other online resources.

They had hoped to also establish a World Health Organization HINARI account for the hospital providing direct access to medical literature through PubMed’s LinkOut feature, but this proved to not be cost effective for this small hospital. “Instead we used the $1,000 cost of the HINARI subscription to buy more textbooks for the physical library,” said Leon Guerrero.

Yap State Hospital has 36 in-patient beds and 12 doctors (including one surgeon and one anesthesiologist), and serves both the high island of Yap (population 8,000) and the inhabited outer islands (population 4,000). The lovely facility, built in 1979, sets in a tropical garden with flame trees brightening the yard, provides both in-patient and outpatient care.

The new medical library, centrally located near the administrative offices and the medical records room in the outpatient department wing, has an office computer for the library manager and four public access computers with filtered Internet access. The Internet access allows the staff to access online resources including a subscription to almost 70 textbooks in STAT!Ref and hundreds of full-text journals on EBSCO through subscriptions paid for by the Pacific Regional Educational Laboratory. The library has a PubMed “My NCBI” account that provides tabbed search results with tabs for English language articles, and free full-text making it easier for the staff to find articles they can use.

The library management software is ResourceMate (R) from Jaywell Software, and inexpensive, easy to-use online catalog and circulation system designed for small libraries. Although not designed for hospital libraries, it is easily adapted for such use. One of its most attractive feature is that it uses machine readable cataloging records and one can either import the records or use the built-in ISBN retrieval feature to search online catalog such as the National Library of Medicine and the Welch Medical Library at Johns Hopkins, among many other libraries.

While in Yap, Cohen and Hadley also assisted the Yap State Public Library Librarian to install the ResourceMate software at the newly renovated public library, also destroyed by Typhoon Sudal in 2004. In the process, they brought together Laamtal and Gilmatam from the Yap State Hospital with Isabel Rungrad, the Yap State Public Librarian, so they could share information between the two libraries about using the software. Before the end of the visit, both librarians were not just sharing expertise, but books and library supplies as well.

Finally, in preparation for the Pacific Islands Association of Libraries and Archives annual conference to be held in Yap on Nov. 17-22, 2008, Cohen and Hadley met with the newly formed Yap State Library Association. They worked on the draft by-laws and preparations for the PIALA Conference. [B][I](PR)[/I][/B]