Hunting down fugitives is all in a day's work for Mary Doug Wright.
Fugitive literature, that is.
As senior librarian at the B.C. Office of Health Technology Assessment, (BCOHTA) Wright and her colleagues are responsible for searching, scanning and checking voluminous amounts of data relevant to BCOHTA assessment requests.
This includes fugitive literature or information that may be unpublished and is not indexed in electronic databases.
"It's really a challenge to ferret out new literature," says Wright. "Keeping current and organizing all the material is a huge task."
Tracking down research studies means scouring international electronic databases of medical indices and abstracts as well as print directories, journals, newsletters and bibliographies.
The detective work begins once the primary BCOHTA researcher has completely defined the assessment request.
That's when Wright starts working on the search strategies. She looks for technology assessment information in areas as diverse as biostatistics, law, anthropology and finance.
"We use local and international electronic medical, technical, scientific and business databases," says Wright. "We're also connected to an international network of health sciences libraries."
BCOHTA's library collection has almost 8,000 items including newsletters, journals, industry reports, policy statements and conference proceedings.
Wright and librarian Diane Helmer also look for results of randomized controlled therapeutic trials on the relevant technology or drug and for any pertinent clinical practice guidelines.
They retrieved more than 1,700 items last year, including the fugitive literature that is a special challenge to collect, says Wright.
To find the information, Helmer manually searches through directories of investigators looking for a connection to the subject being evaluated, calls health technology organizations for information, scans hundreds of newsletters and checks health and technical organizations' Web sites. She also phones, e-mails or writes directly to organizations and individuals to find pertinent research material.
This job of monitoring information continues throughout the BCOHTA assessment, some of which take two or more years to complete.
Five or six projects are usually researched simultaneously.
Once the researchers have reviewed the information, library assistant Catherine Howett gets the requested reprints of articles from the Web or through inter-library loans.
Searches are not limited to the English language because that would bias the results, says Wright. Key articles in other languages are translated.
BCOHTA library staff collaborate with library groups and work directly with researchers through one-on-one tutorials to share search strategies.
Wright, who holds an honours undergraduate degree in Genetics from the University of Alberta and a master's degree in Library Science from UBC, says the medical librarian field has grown beyond hospitals and medical schools. Medical librarians are now employed by pharmaceutical companies, research organizations and non-profit health organizations.