Digitization of Medical Journals in a Medium-Size Hospital Library

Abstract

Shaare Zedek (SZ) Medical Library serves approximately 700 physicians, 1,200 nurses, 250 nursing students and hundreds of medical students. The library holds 1,500 printed books, 700 printed journals and provides access to more than 8,000 electronic journals and 2,000 electronic books. In 2015 SZ Medical Library launched a digitization project to convert part of its collection of printed journals to electronic format. In the span of five years, a very limited library staff the library digitized 2,452,683 pages. As of March 2022, approximately 740,000 pages were fully processed including optical character recognition (OCR). Processing scanned pages has become part of the library staff’s routine. Digitization of scientific journals is not a new idea. Large-scale digitization projects and initiatives started in the late 1980s and the early 1990s (1). Today the majority of scientific journals are published in electronic form only and a growing number of printed journals are switching to electronic only (2–5). The electronic-only trend is particularly noticed in life-science and medical journals (6). Articles describing various digitization projects are available in the literature (7,8). Such projects range from very large scale projects undertaken by large scientific publishers to local initiatives undertaken by small institutional libraries (8,9). Shaare Zedek (SZ) library is a medium size hospital library holding about 1,500 printed books, 600–700 printed journals and provides access to more than 8,000 electronic journals and 2,000 electronic books. In 2015 SZ Medical Library launched a digitization project to convert part of its collection of printed journals to electronic format. This paper describes all the stages of this project from its conception.