Delaware Valley Information Consortium: A History

The Delaware Valley Information Consortium (DEVIC) was founded on October 25, 1979, by Chris Balonis of Doylestown Hospital, Betty Lou Diemer of Surburban General Hospital, Dee Disardina of Rolling Hill Hospital, Patty Insetta of Abington Memorial Hospital, and Ray Roedell of Norristown State Hospital. These members canvassed other local librarians with the idea of a consortium to promote the sharing of journal resources among the community hospitals of the Greater Philadelphia Region, with Bucks and Montgomery County institutions among the first contacted.

Interlibrary loan requests at that time were sent to the College of Physicians under the Mid-Eastern Regional Medical Library Service program started by the National Library of Medicine. The regional medical library program was a national program started in 1965 under the Johnson administration. Each region was assigned to a designated library to fill loans and the College of Physicians was our designated library in this region. At first, all requests sent to the College of Physicians were filled free of charge. Then the regional programs became such a success that NLM decided to charge for the service. The first charges for the ILL were nominal, but by 1983 the cost had risen to $6.00 per loan. In response, local librarians decided to form consortia so as not to spend extra funds for interlibrary loans.

The first DEVIC meeting was held on February 13, 1980. The above named librarians guided DEVIC through its first year. Membership was free, all had to submit annual journal lists to the other members, and all submitted quarterly statistics so that use and effectiveness of the resource sharing could be monitored. Bylaws were proposed in 1980. In October 1981 the four women named above were elected to one-year terms as coordinators and were re-elected in September 1982 with Marion Chayes as the alternate. In 1985 an additional coordinator was added and two-year, alternating terms were instituted: three coordinators were elected for two-year terms, and in the intervening year the two other coordinators were elected for two-year terms. This provided a sense of continuity in the leadership.

The consortium's first major project was to create a shared journal list to facilitate reciprocal document delivery. In these early days, the "dark ages of PCs," word processing was the most common application of the office computer, and the first edition of the DEVIC shared journal list was created by Dee and her hospital volunteers by laboriously assembling the printed journal lists of all members, creating a separate file card for each journal title and inscribing on that card the library's 3 letter code along with the beginnings of holding data. Then they photocopied the cards six to a page into a huge printed document, which was reproduced and distributed to all members. This project took months to complete, but was the basis for DEVIC's ultimate success. Prior to using this method of holdings distribution, members had to search through the separate journal lists from each institution, trying to find a library that held the title, plus consider the ranking that was assigned to each library. Borrowers were required to approach the libraries with smaller journals collections--and thus, lower rankings--first for the more common titles and only use the larger, higher-ranking institutions for titles that were not commonly held.

Docline was still eight years away, and the task of requesting an interlibrary loan using the paper system of DEVIC was labor-intensive. First you had to find the libraries with the journal title you needed, then apply the ranking system, then type the request on an ALA interlibrary loan form, then mail it to the first lending library, then wait. Even with all of these steps, loans came quickly came through the mail to supply our patrons with information. If you had an active hospital staff, most of your time was spent at the typewriter. Librarians who only know of our current system of DOCLINE have no idea how long or how much effort it took to get an interlibrary loan.

The reconfiguration of the RML in 1982 from 11 regions to 8 placed together, for the first time, libraries from Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey. Shortly thereafter DEVIC members learned of the UCMP (Union Catalog of Medical Periodicals based at the Medical Library Center of New York) when librarians from UCMP came to Abington Hospital and presented the idea for a master union list that would include DEVIC and other consortia from New York and New Jersey The first union list was a hard copy of DEVIC's holdings; other libraries' holdings were on microfiche that was housed at Abington Hospital, so DEVIC libraries would call Abington for locations for out-of-state UCMP libraries. Eventually, all libraries would receive their own copies of the microfiche. In 1985 all DEVIC members were encouraged to become DOCLINE participants, and later this request was added to the DEVIC bylaws as a requirement for membership. In 1988 DEVIC joined with the Basic Health Science Library Consortium (BHSL), thereby increasing the number of libraries that could be contacted for "free and reciprocal" document delivery.

The membership fluctuated over the years, with a peak of 47 members around 1995. The current membership stands at 31 libraries-a statement of the times with the closures of many of the member libraries. Meetings are held twice a year at various member locations. Eventually dues of $25/year were assessed, then $50. By mid-1995 a members-only discussion list, DEVIC-L, was created and hosted by HSLC to facilitate communications among the membership. In 2005 the governing board was restructured from a set of "coordinators" to an administrative board, to more closely match the MLA Philadelphia Regional Chapter's executive board functions. The current administrative board consists of Rachel Resnick, Chair (Madlyn and Leonard Abramson Center for Jewish Life); Jon Drucker, Chair-Elect (Delaware Academy of Medicine); Rita Haydar, Secretary (St. Mary Medical Center), and Ellen Sanford, Treasurer (Paoli Memorial Hospital). Additional members are appointed to manage the discussion list, keep our DEVIC and BHSL statistics and for other functions.

The bylaws of DEVIC have evolved over the years to reflect changes in the healthcare industry. In the late 1980's and early 1990's when hospitals were forming partnerships, some of the libraries in DEVIC were caught in the middle of these joint ventures. Hospital administrators no longer saw the need for a professional librarian; they thought that running a library with a staff secretary was all you needed to provide library services. DEVIC changed the requirements of membership to preserve the role of the professional librarian. The bylaws indicate that in order to be a member of DEVIC, a library is defined as an information center with a professional responsible for management of library services who has a Master's Degree in Library and/or Information Science; and that the library must be professionally staffed a minimum of twenty hours per week. Some administrators had second thoughts about doing away with the professional library, as doing so meant dismissal from DEVIC and a loss of valuable resource sharing.

DEVIC has always performed together as a group and has taken on many projects to move the consortium forward to meet the information needs of the 21st century. We formed an alliance with the public libraries in the '80's to qualify for an LSCA Title III grant from Pennsylvania to place fax machines in each library so we could supply our patrons with RUSH faxes for patient care. Besides taking advantage of this and other cooperative purchasing opportunities, we often invite vendors to our meetings to present new products to our members, and we offer a stipend to any librarian who would like to attend an educational meeting and then give a report to our members at our next gathering. We all help each other to succeed in showcasing our information gathering skills to our staff in the many different types of hospitals and other institutions. Interlibrary loan and resource sharing remain an integral part of health sciences library operations and may be even more important as we go forward in time. Without these librarians giving their time to help one another we could not do as much as we do.

Previously published in the Chronicle, Volume 24, Number 2, Summer 2006:
http://www.mlaphil.org/chronicle/24n2/summer2006.htm.

Bibliography:

Bunting A.: The Nation's Health Information Network: History of the Regional Medical Library Program, 1965-1985. Bull Med Libr Assoc, 1987 Jul;75 (3 Suppl): 1-62.

Friedman L., Kazen C., Moeller KA., Regenberg P., Cohn JS., Kell KV.: A unique approach to multi-state networking: BHSL (Basic Health Sciences Network). Spec Libr. 1994 Summer;85(3):183-94.