In April this year I made a mad dash to attend the Special Libraries Association’s Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Technology Division’s spring meeting in Philadelphia alongside ComaxSys, one of our channel partners on the East Coast.
Typically, Eduserv sends someone on reconnaissance the year before exhibiting at an event, to determine whether future attendance will be worthwhile – this time we didn’t! We took the risk, and it paid off – phew!
We have seen a growing level of interest in OpenAthens from the commercial sector over the past few years and have provided single sign-on capability for a number of commercial information centres in pharmaceutical companies. On the strength of this and our work with the NHS in the UK and the US Department of Veteran Affairs, we thought the risk worth taking.
The meeting was small but very focused with about 120 information specialists attending from various pharmaceutical and healthcare businesses and therefore every conversation we had was relevant. We were able to talk to companies of every size – Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, Astra Zeneca, Duane Morris LLP, GSK, Otsuka America Pharmaceuticals, Purdue Pharma LP and many more.
As you’d expect, every library has its own specific anomalies and challenges, but there were some common themes, such as the need for usage statistics and access to IT resource.
On both counts our hosted OpenAthens service scores highly. The rich statistics available with OpenAthens enable organisations to measure how online resources are used either by:
- individual account or groups of accounts
- accounts grouped under one administrator, or
- specific resources or collections of (permission sets)
This allows any organisation to slice ‘n’ dice usage data by cost centre, project code or any other way.
It seems that whether it’s a library or information centre in an institution or commercial company, there’s a tendency towards being unable to secure IT resource for projects. Despite the move to electronic information provision – whether that’s for research or say, document delivery – the library tends to be low down in the list of priorities for many IT departments. OpenAthens MD (our hosted service) was attractive to a lot of librarians we spoke to as it obviates the IT department from the decision making and more importantly the implementation process.
Overall it was a really useful event that helped raise our profile among library service providers that operate in this sector and I’m very excited by the success of the conference for us. A large number of hospitals and healthcare providers all over the world use the OpenAthens service and to grow this user base into the pharmaceutical world seems a natural direction and one that will really benefit new users in pharma research teams wherever they’re located.