ABOUT THE COVER
Free book
Rosária Maria Lúcia Prenna Geremia
Librarian, Biblioteca da Faculdade de Medicina/Biblioteca Central Irmão José Otão, Pontifícia Universidade Católica (PUCRS), Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil.
Everyone born in the past millennium, up to the 1960's, were used to searching for most of the information in printed sources.
Books and journals, even for those who were less curious or interested, represented the largest source of answers to questions, whether existential or not. Libraries, at that time, were the reservoir par excellence of the whole production of knowledge.
Since I started my internship 41 years ago, in the first year of the College of Librarianship, influenced by my brother, who had already started his medical school, I have been working in university medical libraries. I have a deep intimate satisfaction, not only for everything that my profession has provided me in terms of wonderful human relationships, but also because I have the privilege of following, in a relatively short space of time, an immeasurable leap in information spread out.
I belong to a time when, to perform a research on a specific pathology, besides researching in specialized books, the Index Medicus1 was used for updates, which were monthly and brought delayed information, in an average of 6 months. Concomitantly, there was the Cumulated Index Medicus,2 which contained the annual production, facilitating retrospective surveys. Since 1966, the National Library of Medicine (Bethesda, USA) has used computers and MEDLINE, currently the largest source of information for health sciences. It now has more than 70 million monthly accesses! Few people know that Brazil, in 1972, was the first country outside the USA to have distance access to MEDLINE; of course that such access, not being public, had a quite high cost, differently from today, when its access is public and without fees through PUBMED.
The Internet has caused a revolution in literary communication, subverting information parameters: as in a magic trick, whose magic wand is our fingertips, we jump over rivers and oceans, cross borders and continents without a passport, accessing catalogues and collections of close or faraway libraries in any latitude or longitude! 3 Since then, voracity for information has almost reached a level of truculence.
Today a researcher demands information even before it is printed... And epub* * Electronic publication - ahead of print. has imposed itself.
On the other hand, virtuality keeps growing.
There is a tendency in publishers of journals to increasingly make their collections retrospectively available, until they are completely digitalized. However, in the meantime, older collections have become extremely valuable in our daily life, carefully preserved in printed paper in libraries, because it is still limited and fearful to only count on texts available virtually.
I wonder about the future of printed works. I am worried about the preservation of extremely rich conventional collections in millions of libraries worldwide. I face a true dilemma when I have to reject precious donations due to the small physical space of a library!
It gives me comfort to know that paper lasts for more than 500 years and to observe that CDs do not have such a perennial duration as it was said when it was introduced in the market.
Since it is easier to be a prophet of the past, I increasingly pay my homage to Gutenberg, who invented the printed book, which in the origin of the word liber Book (from the Latin liber = free). besides liberty also wishes for non-constrained freedom.
References
- 1. Index Medicus. Bethesda: National Library of Medicine; 1960-2005.
- 2. Cumulated Index Medicus. Bethesda: National Library of Medicine; 1960-2000.
- 3. Geremia RMLP. Aflições e reflexões [editorial]. Acta Med. 2004;25:xvii-xviii.
Publication Dates
-
Publication in this collection
31 Mar 2008 -
Date of issue
Dec 2007
