Remember MedPrint? Medical Serials Print Preservation

Posted by Margot M on September 5th, 2024 Posted in: Communities of Interest
Tags: hospital librarians, hospital library advisory group, science librarians

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In the library world, September is a great time to review resource guides for accuracy. One of our guides included a link to MedPrint. Oops! This program ended on December 31, 2021.

What was MedPrint?

According to an archived web page, “In 2011, the Network of the National of Library of Medicine (NNLM) and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) agreed to establish a voluntary national cooperative program to ensure the preservation of and continued access to the literature through a national cooperative medical serials print retention program (MedPrint). In consultation with the Regional Medical Libraries, NLM initially identified approximately 250 [Abridged Index Medicus® (AIM)/PubMed Central® (PMC)] journals as the primary set of materials to preserve in print.”

What exists now?

We contacted the National Library of Medicine with this question. We were told that NLM retains its print copies of the MedPrint journal titles. Library staff continues to digitize these print journals to make them available to researchers. NLM welcomes donations of print journal and index volumes that are missing from their collection.

If your library is discarding print journals, contact NLM. They are interested in filling gaps in their collections, and will pay shipping for the volumes that they need.

Guidance on Deselection

Suzanne Fricke, DVM, MLIS, AHIP and Ann Dyer, MS, AHIP, librarians at the Washington State University Health Sciences Library, presented a poster on deselection at the Medical Library Association Annual Meeting in Portland, OR. If you registered to attend the conference, the content is still available through your login at Pheedloop. Select “Access Virtual Web Portal” to log in.

Here are a few of the references that Fricke and Dyer listed on their poster:

Bowers, M., Allison, T., & Faltinek, A. (2020). Into the Weeds: High-volume Weeding at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. Technical services quarterly., 37(2), 120-127.

Bull, J., & Downey, A. (2024). Not a Special Project Anymore: Creating a Culture of Sustainable Deselection and Gifts-In-Kind with Limited Staffing. Technical services quarterly., 41(1), 64-81.

Wagstaff, K. L., & Liu, G. Z. (2018). Automated Classification to Improve the Efficiency of Weeding Library Collections. Journal of academic librarianship., 44(2), 238-247.