Content and Services Integration in Central Library Applications Software in Iranian Universities of Medical Sciences: An Important Step in Economic Usage of Existing Knowledge

Direct and rapid access to information is one of the main necessities of the users in new technological world. Nowadays, information users, particularly medical information in which rapid access is of necessity, do not have enough time to search and access to information. Therefore, the present study aimed to determine strategies to access required information as soon as possible. This study was performed using library research and content analysis to provide strategies for content and services integration in central library software of Iranian Universities of Medical Sciences. Since there is one central library in each university, all central libraries of 46 Iranian Universities of Medical Sciences affiliated to Ministry of Health and Medical Education, constituted the study population. Descriptive statistics and Excel software were used in order to analyze, describe, and evaluate the findings. Findings of this study illustrated that central libraries in the studied universities as well as their used software for storage and retrieval of bibliographic information and also some of the data software do not care about information exchange and consequently integration of information with other academic central libraries. 71.4% of the studied libraries used Pars Azarakhsh Software. The mentioned software uses MARC metadata format. In addition, 86% of the studied applications could offer standard output metadata format. Given the findings of this study, it is possible to use integration strategies in order to exploit the existing data. Therefore, the studied libraries should integrate their bibliographic data. Thus, it is recommended to use simultaneous searching model, Z39.50 protocol and ISO 2709 standard to integrate their data.