Meet the Special Library

(This is a new feature that may occur in each bulletin. It may be focused on either a particular special library/information environment or individual within our chapter. If you have suggestions for either, please send them to Deanna Briggs at deanna@ll.mit.edu.)

by Bob Moore

My name is Bob Moore, and I'm the manager of the Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) Medical Imaging library.  I have two part time assistants, Stephanie Lewis and Steven Mars, who help me support a site that develops and manufactures radiopharmaceuticals [injectable radioactive materials that create a high quality diagnostic image when photographed with a gamma camera]. The library supports research and development, clinical and regulatory, sales and marketing, and to a far lesser degree, manufacturing.  It translates to about fifty regular users, and many other very occasional users, world-wide (most recent non U.S. email request: Australia).  Our facility, on Treble Cove Road in North Billerica, is easy to find if one knows how to reach the Billerica House of Corrections, our next-door neighbor.

Requests come via email, telephone, and still a fair amount of walk-in.  We provide document delivery (more and more by buying PDFs with a credit card), literature searching, book acquisition, an ejournal website, and we store microfilm copies of laboratory notebooks as part of our collection. I also work on the company's library hotline and provide reference help to other divisions.

Our collection is housed in the R&D Building, (one of ten buildings on the site) just down the hall from the scientists and clinical/regulatory staff, and across the street from sales and marketing.  Pharmaceutical information is mostly captured in journal literature, and our print collection of about seventy journals includes complete runs of nuclear medicine and imaging journals, which are not widely-owned. Standard texts, like the Physician's Desk Reference and the U.S. Pharmacopoeia, are available on the Intranet. A benefit of being owned by “big pharma" has been access to BMS' extensive ejournal and ebook selection, all maintained on an extensive intranet.

Our book collection is about four thousand titles, not counting the ones that “walk away.” Like many corporate libraries, we have open stacks 24/7 with no security gate. This plays havoc with the traditional notion of circulation, and we buy multiple copies of core titles over the years. We share an automated catalog with the rest of BMS, though our division's focus on diagnostic products, as opposed to therapeutics, means we usually share just general science titles.

An ongoing challenge in collection development is supporting the shifting focus of our research. I just added nine new journals to reflect new areas of research in imaging, while canceling other titles. In a few years I may have cause to regret that decision, but we have space limitations, and it seems that access is prized over ownership these days. We do buy new texts as we shift focus and sometimes when scientists leave, their long-ago borrowed books are returned and the decision is made to not retain old titles.

The site itself has changed names five times since the seventies, when it began as New England Nuclear. I was hired in 1992 as an Associate Information Analyst for Dupont Merck, left in 1998 as a Senior Information Management Analyst, returned in 2002 to Bristol-Myers Squibb Medical Imaging as Manager, and found manila folders with my nine-year-old lit searching notes on Dupont stationery. I even have the same cubicle. Who says you can't go home?

What should I tell you that is unique about this library?  Our collection of nuclear imaging journals made us a unique supplier in the halcyon dates of OCLC ILL.  We occupy a niche that requires some explanation to those whose knowledge of diagnostic imaging is limited to x-ray and ultrasound. I'm also told by my New Jersey supervisor that we have the driest sense of humor in the company.

The most wonderful dream enhancement I would like for our library is to digitally scan our full retrospective of nuclear imaging titles, all in color and impossible to microfilm. One can dream, can’t they?

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