Staff Notes: Kristine Alpi

Kristine Alpi (Veterinary Medicine Library) has been granted the 2011 Medical Library Association’s Research, Development, and Demonstration Project Grant to study the best ways for libraries to provide scanned images to their users. The $1000 grant will allow Alpi and her team to investigate what scanning parameters can most effectively convey scientific information from image-rich biomedical articles published in print journals.

When today’s library users ask for a copy of an article, the default, without much thought to the matter, is often to provide a black and white scan. Increasingly though, print publications in the sciences include images in which color is absolutely essential to conveying the meaning of the graphic. Alpi’s research will help academic and other librarians address the tradeoff between print quality and expense as they decide how to deliver documents to researchers and other users.

The research will be done in collaboration with the Interlibrary and Document Delivery service of the NCSU Libraries. Faculty from the College of Veterinary Medicine who are leading three image-intensive residency programs--including Dr. Carol Grindem and Dr. Jennifer Neel of Clinical Pathology , Dr. Keith Linder of Anatomic Pathology , and Dr. James Brown, Jr. of Radiology --are partnering with Alpi on the selection of articles relevant to education, clinical care and research and their assessment by residents in these disciplines.

The study’s findings will potentially be used to inform the way interlibrary loan practices are used to meet the information needs of clinicians and scientists worldwide.