Every month, UK Libraries adds new electronic resources to its collection of over 700 databases. One new addition, the LWW Health Library: Premium Basic Sciences, is making an outsized impact by helping reduce costs for students across the health sciences.
LWW Health Library contains 54 core health sciences textbooks that are used widely by students and faculty in the Colleges of Medicine, Health Sciences, and Nursing, with applicability to courses in the Colleges of Public Health, Dentistry, Pharmacy, and Agriculture, Food, & Environment.
Included in the collection are eight books which are used by every student in both the College of Medicine and the Physician Assistant Studies Program, along with many others that are required for a variety of programs and courses.
Purchasing physical copies of the textbooks, which frequently retail at over $100, can quickly become prohibitively expensive for students.
“We hold physical copies of each of these textbooks at the Medical Center Library as course reserves, but users can only access them on campus, and for no more than two hours at a time,” said Nursing Liaison Librarian Stephanie Henderson. “For textbooks that are required for hundreds of students, this simply did not serve our users. With the addition of LWW Health Library, our users now have free and unlimited access to these core resources, from anywhere.”
As a “perpetual access collection,” LWW Health Library automatically updates its holdings to include the latest edition of each textbook.
“We are thrilled that we can directly support our users by offering these resources at no cost,” said Medicine Liaison Lauren Robinson. “Increasing affordability was one of the primary motivations for acquiring this resource. When students no longer have to purchase these books, we can help lower their financial burden and chip away at economic barriers to higher education.”
The use of resources like these is a key component in UK Libraries’ drive to provide users with affordable course content and increase equitable access to education.
LWW Health Library is useful in both educational and clinical settings. “The collection is tailored to medical education, with case studies, quiz functions, and a variety of video resources that accompany the textbooks,” said Robinson. “But the textbooks are also important as medical reference tools that providers turn to again and again in their clinical practice.”
The addition of LWW Health Sciences will also benefit UK’s medical campuses in Bowling Green, Morehead, and Northern Kentucky, along with the Center of Excellence in Rural Health in Hazard.
“This resource allows us to serve all of our users, no matter where they are across the state, and to consistently and reliably provide the most up-to-date editions of all of these texts. Health sciences faculty are ecstatic about having access to this collection,” said Henderson.
LWW Health Library rounds out UK Libraries’ perpetual access health care collections, which also include:
Together, these resources provide core textbooks, reference books, pharmacological resources, and point-of-care tools and guidelines to students, clinicians, and the full spectrum of medical professionals.
To find more new and on-trial databases and electronic resources, visit our A-Z Database page. The “New/Trial Databases” list is on the right-hand side of the page beneath “Featured Databases.”
