Hospitals are not alone in having to come to terms with the
volume of space occupied by paper records.
Shops, banks, armed services, schools, and libraries are all facing the
same issues. The Bodleian library in
Oxford, simultaneously blessed and cursed by being a copyright library and
therefore entitled to receive a copy of every book published in England,
exploded, almost literally, in 2010 when it moved a huge store of books to an
industrial estate in Swindon, as described here.
The number of pieces of paper in the form of books, journals
and files of various kinds is growing too quickly for physical storage to be
feasible. It’s a slightly obvious point
to make, but I’ll bash on with it: back
in September, 1964, when the first issue of the Journal of Medical Genetics appeared, there wasn’t a storage problem because there
were no back issues of this journal.
Now, as the 50th anniversary approaches, back issues occupy
almost half of a wall of our departmental library.
When this is added to the piles of case notes currently reproducing
themselves in our department, there is a serious storage problem. It’s not quite as acute as the storage issue
in the picture below, but it’s not a million miles away from it either.
Which is better, paper or electronic? People seem to prefer paper journals because
they can be picked up and browsed. But maybe that seems better
because that is what we are used to. Would people who had never been exposed
to paper journals feel the same? Unusually for
me, I picked up a paper copy of the Journal
of Medical Genetics the other day and had a flick through. There is no
doubt that browsing through a paper version of an article, or entire journal,
is a nicer experience than trying to do the same thing electronically. But then, I was brought up on paper. It’s
hard to know how much of this ease of use is becauseof that, and
how much reflects the fact that it genuinely is easier. We may never know.
Recently, and rather naively as it turned out, I ventured to
suggest to my colleagues in Exeter that, since all the journals that we stock
are now available electronically (leaving aside pre-1990 or so issues) our
department would benefit from disposal of all paper journals with a move to
reliance on electronic archives. This
did not go well. While some people agreed, others offered their opposition to the idea in robust terms.
Needless
to say, I remain on the side of electronic rather than paper storage and would
like to put the case for the advantages of electronic journal articles, other
than those related to space-saving:
- Electronic articles can be read on our PCs, where we look at just about everything else these days
- In finding a particular article, it is quicker and more convenient to go to the online index rather than go to the library and search through the rows of hard copies on the shelves
- If individual journal issues are held loosely rather than bound, as they are in most departmental libraries, breath-holding, while you establish whether or not the issue that you want is actually there, is not required
- If you like the article and want to make a copy, you don’t have to go through the laborious, expensive and irritating process of photocopying it
- You can search the article electronically for any key-word, rather than scan a paper copy repeatedly for the bit that you are interested in. This is really important!
- The electronic version of an article can be linked directly to a patient’s electronic patient record, in the same way as a photocopied article could be filed in the patient’s notes
· Let’s
face it, we are in a period of major transition at the moment, between paper
and digital storage formats. At some point in around 2163, the last piece of paper will have disappeared
from Clinical Genetics Departments in the UK, but until we reach that happy
state, compromise will continue to be needed. We’ll keep the paper journals
(for now).
