El espiritu de ayuda mutua: Situación actual del servicio de obtención de documentos en las bibliotecas de ciencias de la salud en la Comunidad de Madrid

Easier access to the bibliographic reference of the medical journals has led to the need of obtaining a big number of primary documents. Nowadays, the Document Supply Service (DSS) is an indispensable tool in the Health Science Library, where it has been developed and consolidated, supporting teaching and investigation. The demand increase of DSS in the Libraries has produced organizational changes orientated to the collaboration and interlibrary cooperation to satisfy the the users’ demands. From 1992, the Community of Madrid is developing an interlibrary collaborative agreement which in this moment is in drawing-board stage of Consortium and one of which main objectives is optimization of this service. The objective of the present work is to analyze the infrastructure, management and activity of the DSS of the libraries of the health sciences that comprise, as members of right plenary session, the project of Consortium of the Community of Madrid. A survey with 36 questions has been sent to all the libraries members of right plenary session of the Consortium Project. The questions can be included in 5 main areas: human resources; technical access; way of management; activity, and costs. The collected data have been used to formulate indicators to serve to analyze the DSS functioning. The results were: 1. The access to the DSS is offered to all the potential users and is held with all the libraries that demand it, 2. High volume of document obtention and mainly supplying, in a fast form and with a low cost. 3. The DSS are managed with scant human and technical infrastructure, by the own Library. 75% of the libraries even self-finance it, 4. 51% of the document requests are made by the members of the Project Consortium, and only 30% are for self-use. The conclusion is that the DSS holds neither the recognition nor the importance it deserves from institutions, is managed independently by the participating libraries on their own (what allows its existence, but not its further development in material or human resources) and their productivity is obtained thanks to the effort of the equipments working in them and to the optimization of the corporative work, supported in a spirit of mutual aid that will be the base of the future corporative development