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4 – WESTMOUNT INDEPENDENT – November 10-11, 2009
Library rolls out pain collection
By Laureen Sweeney
Weekly
Presstime: Monday at 10:30 am
Editor: David Price
Deputy editor: Kristin McNeill
Chief reporter: Laureen Sweeney
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The unveiling by the Westmount Public
Library of an extensive collection on pain
management took place last week November
1 to 7, coinciding with National Pain
Awareness Week. A special display will
also run for several weeks.
More than four dozen books, audio-visual
material and periodicals have been
purchased to provide resources for those
living with chronic pain due to illness, injury
or other reasons, such as arthritis,
other musculoskeletal disorders, and mental
health issues.
The new collection was made possible
by a $4,000 grant over three years from the
Louise and Alan Edwards Foundation.
This is a private non-profit organization
established in 2000 to help fund basic and
clinical research into chronic pain.
“We requested the grant because pain
crosses all health disciplines,” said library
board member Jean Williams, a psychiatric
nurse.
Williams, who has been instrumental
in helping the library develop its information
centre on health, spearheaded the
pain management initiative last April with
committee colleague and former city
councillor Tom Thompson, along with
now retired library director Ann Moffat.
“A public library with knowledgeable
and experienced professionals is a trusted
place for members of the public to seek reliable
information to help them maintain
control of their lives,” Williams explained.
As part of the collected material, the library
has taken out a subscription to the
monthly magazine Arthritis Today.
Specialist to speak Nov. 26
The launch includes a lecture on November
26 by psychologist Dr. Jeffrey
Mogil of the MUHC, who will speak at 7
pm at the library on “Genes and Friends:
The Emerging Science of Pain Control”.
Mogil, a specialist in the genetics of
pain, has been quoted as stating that “pain
is the granddaddy of all health concerns”
and “the number one reason that people
go to the medical doctor in the first place.”
Based on figures from the Edwards
Foundation that one in five Canadian
adults is afflicted by pain on a regular
basis, this would suggest that close to
1,000 Westmounters might be affected.
“As our population ages, pain and more
complex chronic pain become part of
many of our lives,” Williams states in the
library’s grant application.
“It is not easy for most adults with pain
to learn to manage it, physically and emotionally,
to communicate clearly with
health professionals and to maintain a
high quality of life. This is also true, of
course, for adolescents and young children.”
The $4,000 grant has enabled the library
to assemble start-up materials and
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will cover continued expansion of the collection
over the next two years. The library
has undertaken thereafter to maintain the
currency of materials and the level of excellence.
Figures released by the foundation state
that of the Canadian adults living with
daily pain, one third with moderate or severe
pain have lost a job or had to reduce
More databases accessible from home
Library acquires microfilm
reader, expands remote access
By Laureen Sweeney
work responsibilities.
Lost productivity due to pain costs the
economy some $6 billion a year. As well,
more than half of those with chronic pain
also suffer from depression. Suicide rates
are almost double among this group.
For further information, see www.understandingthepain.ca.
A new state-of-the-art microfilm reader
at the Westmount Public Library enables
users to sharpen images, select particular
photos or news items, and then copy them
onto a memory stick, print them to a regular
printer or email them.
The library believes it to be one of the
only such digital machines available in
public libraries. It forms part of the library’s
drive to provide new electronic resources,
including a long list of databases
that can also be accessed remotely through
the library website.
The digital microfilm machine brings
new life to the library’s sizeable collection
of more than 2,000 reels of newspapers
and old magazines. It replaces the 20-yearold
model that has simply “expired” after
having had extensive use.
“Our new one provides much higher
performance and is a vast improvement,”
said reference librarian Benoit Morin.
Installed without fanfare over the summer,
the $10,000 unit comes with a large
vertical monitor for easy viewing of a standard
newspaper page. It also has enhancement
functions and is proving
especially useful in genealogical research
through obituaries, he said.
Users can also view their own reels, including
those they have obtained from
other sources such as inter-library loans
from the National Archives of Canada.
The library’s own microfilm collection
provides updated copies of The Gazette
dating back to 1987 and copies of Westmount
newspapers back to 1907. It includes
old copies of magazines such as
Time, Maclean’s, Newsweek, Life and Scientific
American.
Databases for remote access
While the library continues to expand
its wide variety of databases, “a lot of people
don’t know they have remote access to
them from home from the website, 24
hours a day,” explained reference librarian
Mai Jay.
Users must enter the number of their
membership card, though the new Tumble
Book Library collection does not require
a card.
Other recent acquisitions include
Grove Art and Consumer Health Complete
that has full text content for more
than 1,000 health-related magazines.
Among the more popular databases is
the ProQuest Canadian Newsstand that
provides full-text articles from The Globe &
Mail, The Gazette, National Post and others.
“This way, we are paying the fee and
our members can access these papers
without paying,” explained Jay.
A separate Globe & Mail historical database
(Canadian Heritage from 1844) provides
digitized full-image versions of the
newspaper back to its inception.
Other database topics include the arts,
dictionaries and encyclopedias, literature
and science.
Among new databases coming in 2010,
is Eureka with full-text articles from 1985
onwards from La Presse, Le Soleil, Le Devoir,
Le Droit and L’Actualité, as well as several
magazines.
Correction
In “Upsets, nail-biters and landslides"
(November 3, p. 1), we incorrectly identified
the number of women councillors
in the new city council. There are in fact
(a non-record breaking) four.
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