By Raisa livonen and Sinikka Suckcharoen

The Veterinary Library in Finland has participated in the fair of the Annual Meeting of the Finnish Veterinary Association. Practising veterinarians gather once a year, for three days, for the purpose of continuing education. As part of this gathering, there is a fair, at which those industries relating to veterinary practice, exhibit their products. There are also stands for the Museum of Veterinary History, the Student Association, and all the animal welfare associations. The two big Finnish bookshops, and some smaller publishers, are there too.

Our library demonstrated the latest methods of accessing veterinary information for the first time in 1994. We started by introducing VETCD and BEASTCD to veterinarians. We brought all the necessary equipment, and set up demonstrations of how to seek information from databases, and how to access information via CDROM. We thought that it was important information to give, and that vets would be really interested. However, the attendance level was low - first because the idea of a library appearing in such a fair seemed unusual, and second because of the fact that computers were involved.

As a "side product" we also brought all the publications of the College of Veterinary Medicine to be browsed, and we prepared some order forms to be filled in. This was a success, the vets preferring to touch real books, and to buy them (they were cheaper in comparison to the prices of our two bookstores), rather than to look at computer screens. The consequence of this was that the Library was given the job of selling all the publications of the College of Veterinary Medicine, from 1995 onwards (the good side of this is that the Library gets some income from it!).

This year, 1995, we introduced HELKA, our on-line catalogue, in order to show our customers that their library has finally moved into the computerized era. For example, our very successful service for sending books by post, directly to practitioners, now needs all clients to be recorded in the VTLS-system. So, we made out borrower cards on the spot!

On our three metre square stand, we also had a PC for demonstrating VETCD and BEASTCD, and a section for the College publications, especially the book describing 50 years of the history of the College.

This year the practitioners were not so afraid of computers anymore maybe there were more younger vets, and maybe the need for computerizing small practices is growing. And there are several answers to that need!

Those three days at the Helsinki Fair Centre were very interesting, sometimes fun, sometimes quite hard for us. We met several customers who have only been names on requests, or voices on the telephone, until now. Also our "own" teachers and doctors from our Animal Hospital saw "their" library in a different light. And, perhaps one of the most important reasons to be there is that in the future not all the vets in Finland will have graduated from our faculty. As a member of the European Union, Finland accepts the qualifications from other EU veterinary colleges and faculties. Even now all the vets in the field do not know what the information sources in their field are in Finland, since not all of them properly read the journal of their association, in which we write occasional articles about our services.

We would like to hear/ read comments from our colleagues as to whether anybody else has been doing anything of this kind, and if so, what kind of experiences have they had? What kind of technical links did they have with their libraries? (We had a modem and a direct connection to the Computer Centre of the University of Helsinki.) What kind of demonstration material did they have - posters, leaflets etc.?

Would this be an interesting subject to be brought up in Coimbra in 1996? Perhaps we could bring some exhibition material for comparison with that of other libraries?

We think that everybody needs fresh ideas to help them evaluate their daily work.

These are our thoughts, one month after the 1995 fair.