As a member of Ramsay Health Care, one of Australia's largest health care groups, the hospital library has played a leading role in developing a national corporate information resource. The hospital library chose Athena as a key component in its large and growing system of electronic resource sharing. Librarian Ann Ritchie provides information services to the staff at Hollywood Private Hospital, as well as to a community of clients and libraries stretching from Perth on the western coast of Australia to 13 other hospitals and clinics across the country in the Ramsay Health Care group. Their locations include Adelaide in South Australia, Sydney in New South Wales, and Greenslopes in Queensland. In the Hollywood Private Hospital itself, Athena is networked to provide access to library resources from throughout the hospital.
Administrators hope to provide Internet access to the catalog soon.
Athena catalog records are sent to the Australian Bibliographic Network and the Western Australia Hospital Libraries Joint Serials Catalog. Recently the library had a full retrospective conversion of their serials performed by their serials vendor, making it easy to load their titles and holdings into Athena, as well as to share them with these union catalogs. These email services are an integral part of the library s reference work, enabling the staff to answer questions as well as to send literature searches, current awareness information, and high-quality document reproductions of their monographs and serials to their patrons locally and across Australia. The Hospital s staff, which includes doctors, nurses, specialists, and others, relies on electronic delivery of information. And Athena is an integral part of this solution.