January 2000 - Alan Milburn, Secretary of State for Health, was at the Tavistock Clinic on Tuesday January 11th to launch its new, improved library. The Tavistock Clinic chose SIRSI's Unicorn Collection Management System as a key component of its information management and dissemination strategy.
The leading NHS centre for psychotherapy based in Hampstead - founded by psychiatrists who treated shell shock during the First World War - was recently the subject of a six-part BBC2 documentary, Talking Cure.
Now thanks to a total investment of almost £270,000 from the Tavistock & Portman NHS Trust, London Regional Office of the NHS Executive and North London Consortium, it will offer much more than just the traditional library services of textbooks and study space. Indexes, journals and catalogues will be available electronically to help enhance the Tavistock Clinic's role as one of the country's largest mental health training organisations at the start of the new millennium.
The library -- re-named The Tavistock and Portman Library -- a national resource for mental health and psychotherapy -- has been enlarged and refurbished and a new web-based library catalogue (SIRSI's WebCat) installed to link with the Trust's new website.
Thanks to the hi-tech improvements which have now been made to library services, staff and postgraduate students in therapeutic mental health can access information at home or work at any time via a PC with a modem. Such flexible learning fits in with the government's National Service Framework for Mental Health which stresses the crucial role of training in the recruitment and retention of staff.
