The TTUHSC El Paso libraries have had a highly developed extramural and outreach program in place for the past 30 years. The geographic target area for this program is the greater El Paso area and southern New Mexico. In this area there exists no other biomedical information resource network to meet the needs of the region's non-military hospitals, medical, nursing, and health rehabilitation clinics, private practices, nurse practitioner programs, and school nurse programs. There is also no other established local libraries to service the biomedical information needs of biomedically-related researchers and industries in this area. Finally, health care consumer user groups have no other reliable resource for accurate health care information throughout this vast area.
The TTUHSC El Paso libraries have therefore developed a tiered set of services to meet the information needs of this diverse unaffiliated set of entities. For a relatively small expense, hospitals, biomedical research firms, clinics, and law firms may contract with the TTUHSC El Paso libraries on an annual basis. These contracts provide the recipient interlibrary loan services, document delivery, borrowing privileges, and reference services for a nominal fee. Once the contract amount is expended during the contract period, the recipient of services is billed at internal fee levels on a monthly basis.
Private individuals are also eligible to receive for-fee services. For an annual subscription fee, members of the unaffiliated public may join the TTUHSC El Paso Friends of the Library. This membership provides borrowing privileges, Loansome Doc ILL services, and document delivery services at internal fee levels.
None of these services include access to TTUHSC El Paso libraries’ electronic books, journals, or databases. However, these resources may be freely accessed from within any of the TTUHSC El Paso libraries.
In addition to this set of for-fee contract services, the TTUHSC El Paso libraries deliver free biomedical information services training and health care awareness services to the citizenry of West Texas through its contract with the National Library of Medicine, the library system administers training on databases, health care topics, and consumer health information. The libraries demonstrate these products and services at city and town, county, regional, and national conferences. The public services librarians form an outreach delivery team positioned to efficiently and effectively deliver these services to communities and individuals throughout the Paso del Norte region.
