BIREME Headquarters

In the afternoon of February 11 I
visited the headquarters of BIREME and met with technical and library
staff.

BIREME is an important technical and
library project in Brazil. Founded in the 1960s, it has played an
important role in the dissemination of health science and related
information within Latin America. Most recently, BIRMEME has launched
SciELO (Scientific electronic library online), an important
aggregation of science publications online. SciELO participants
include much of Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as Portugal
and Spain. SciELO is both a publication platform as well as a
delivery tool and is used by a wide variety of journals. SciELO is
also fully open access with no subscription or access charges for
users.

At BIREME, I met with Marcia Y.
Barretto (overseeing IT infrastructure and related activities),
Fabiana Montanari (on the library side of things) and Renato
Toshiyuki Murasaki (the lead technical developer). Marcia also
introduced me to a number other support staff and also gave me a tour
of the physical collections (primarily unbound journals; unbound so
that they are easily copied/digitized for interlibrary loan purposes.

I also had a chance to say goodbye
(ciao) to Dr. Abel Packer, Director of BIREME and a driving forces in
the BHL collaboration.

– Matin R. Kalfatovic