Mission
The Nelda Faye Ackerman Learning Resource Center (LRC) is designed to foster the advancement of education, research, and scholarship in nurse anesthesia by providing access to students, faculty, alumni, and the nurse anesthesia community for information needed to support and enhance professional practice activities.
Holdings
Due to the technological advances of electronic and digital content acquisition, MTSA’s collection can now be found via subscriptions to five databases, 37 e-journals, and 83 e-books. Any print materials are kept for historical significance in the field of nurse anesthesia and will remain at the discretion of the Research and Library Assistant.
Faculty instructing in any course may submit a request for electronic texts related to their subject area. Any purchases for written text for an entire class must be approved by the Program Director for the Research and Library Assistant to order. Regular review of the LRC holdings will be performed by the Research and Library Assistant, to assess and evaluate for relevancy and utilization of such holdings by the student body. Additions and deletions to the library’s holdings will be reviewed annually through the Nurse Anesthesia Program Council (NAPC), after initial review and approval by the Research and Library Assistant.
Lending Agreements
The Research and Library Assistant ensures that the Learning Resource Center maintains reciprocal lending agreements with other libraries to supplement gaps in the collection. These agreements include Freeshare, a cross-regional library group for National Library of Medicine (NLM) libraries that would like to participate in free, reciprocal lending. To join, libraries must report serial holdings in NLM’s DOCLINE and agree to exchange free interlibrary loans with other participants. Students and faculty can order individual copies of full text articles via Interlibrary Loan through the LRC request form. Typically, an article is received within 24-48 hours and emailed to the requestor. On the rare occasion that the requested article is not available from these reciprocal lending libraries, the article may be purchased by LRC once approved by the Program Director
The Research and Library Assistant belongs to Tennessee Health Sciences Library Association (THeSLA), a statewide library resource sharing group whose members participate in free reciprocal lending practices. The Research and Library Assistant is also a member of the Association of Seventh-day Adventist Librarians (ASDAL), whose primary focus is electronic content licensing and consists of 75 private academic libraries on six continents.
Library Hours of Operation
The Research and Library Assistant is available by appointment in person, by telephone, by email, or Teams during normal MTSA business hours (Monday through Thursday, 8 am-6 pm). To ensure the LRC services, collections, and resources meet the student and faculty needs, an annual survey is conducted for feedback and suggestions to improve the processes and holdings.
Research Search Tips and Tutorials
PUBMED (open access)
PubMed: Using the Advanced Search Builder - YouTube
Clinical Trials – National Library of Medicine (open access)
OVID database
Wolters Kluwer - Online Training (ovid.com)
Wolters Kluwer - Support & Training (ovid.com)
CINHAL Database
CINAHL-Complete-Take-Away-Guide.pdf (ebsco.com)