The Jamaica Tourist Board Library

Table of Contents

Background.

Mission.

Collections.

Ebrary – Jamaica Tourist Board.

Ebsco Host- Hospitality and Tourism Complete.

Jamaica Collection.

Gleaner Company- Gleaner Archives.

Social and Economic Information Network- SECIN database.

Media Clippings On-line.

Image Library.

UNWTO E-Library.

Library services.

Library Affiliations.

Staffing.

 

Background

 

The Jamaica Tourist Board (JTB) library is one of the leading special libraries in Jamaica and the Caribbean. Its clientele spans the primary through tertiary students, researchers of the trade and general tourism interests. The library’s collections include monographs, continuing resources, audio, visual audiovisual and electronic resources. The library holds in its in-house collections sources dating as far back as the 1960’s and even further in some external databases.

The library began in the early 1960s, when the need for a photographic collection to meet the promotional objectives of the Jamaica Tourist Board became evident. This resulted in a collection of black and white photographs being organized with the addition of a collection of color slides as the organizational demand for this type of material increased.

 The further expansion of the roles and functions of the Jamaica Tourist Board and the amalgamation of the functions of the Tourism Product Development Company in the early 1980s, necessitated the expansion of the library and its services to better meet the needs of its clients, as a result, the library, consisting of the existing photographic collection, was reorganized circa 1982 at which time the addition of other sources began.

 The library was established as a unit within the Local Communication and Marketing Departments, Public Relations unit with the objective of meeting the information needs of the organization. Today the library is a unit within the Marketing Department and serves the tourism information needs of clients across the world.

 The unit has grown significantly over the years and now boasts a much larger and more diverse collection of information sources in both physical and electronic formats.

 

 Mission

 

The mission of the library is to maintain and manage access to collections of relevant, current information sources, necessary to support the organization in the achievement of its goals and objectives, and to facilitate students and researchers of the tourism trade and tourism interests within the wider global society.  The library attempts to succeed at this mission primarily through: 

§  The provision and maintenance access to timely, relevant in-house collections of information resources in all formats,

§  efficient access to remote electronic information resources, such as on-line databases, repositories and electronic publications;

§  provision of support required by staff in fulfilling the organization’s goals; and

§  the provision of appropriate services to students, researchers of the trade and the wider global society.

It is the vision of the library to become the hub of a full-service information network for the Jamaica Tourist Board, the primary source of tourism information in Jamaica and the primary source of information on the Jamaican tourist industry to the world.

The current thrust of the library is to have all its collections in electronic format and accessed electronically by its users. Already information seekers are having increasingly wider access to the collections at both our Montego Bay and Kingston offices and remotely through our Tourism Information Publishing Site (TIPS). Some collections are fully available while others are moving in that direction. TIPS can be viewed at http://www.jtbonline.org and the library’s site can be viewed at http://site.ebrary.com/lib/jamaica/home.action by authenticated users.

 

Collections

 

The following collections are use as the primary sources of information in the achievement of these goals. They represent a cross-section of owned and shared resources acquired through gifts, purchases, information partnerships and subscriptions.

 

Ebrary – Jamaica Tourist Board

 

The Jamaica Tourist Board has partnered with Ebrary Limited to roll out its full digital library facility. The software allows full electronic access to both internal and external clients. Internal clients are authorized through the organization Internet Protocol ranges and have instant access to the resources held within the database. External clients currently share these privileges through other user authentication methods. Some of the outstanding features of the Ebrary system include:

·         Create a personal bookshelf -to automatically save an archive of your highlights and notes as you conduct research. Unless you create a bookshelf and sign in before annotating any documents, your annotations will not be saved.

·         Search- by choosing simple or advanced (by keyword, full-text, publisher, or author). Use Boolean or proximity operators.

·         Instantly open documents in Quick View -by clicking on a book jacket or title. No downloads or installations are required.

·         Navigate-using the table of contents, which shows search results at the chapter level. You may also navigate to every occurrence of your search term in a document, flip through pages, or go to specific page numbers.

·         Launch the ebrary Reader -for added functionality by “clicking on the ebrary Reader” button. The book will open in its own Java application separate from the search results in your browser. To return to your search results, close the Reader window or switch back to your browser application.

·         Use ebrary InfoTools- to expand your research to other library resources and information on the web. Many InfoTools features can be activated by selecting words of interest in a document.

·         Copy and print with automatic citations- Use Preferences on the InfoTools menu to choose from four citation styles. ebrary citations include a URL back to the source.

·         Highlight- text with or without notes and post multiple notes to a page. They are automatically stored on your personal bookshelf.

·         Add a hyperlink to selected text- Once you locate relevant, online information from other sources using InfoTools, create a hyperlink in the ebrary document directly to that source.

 

Ebsco Host- Hospitality and Tourism Complete

 

Hospitality & Tourism Complete covers scholarly research and industry news relating to all areas of hospitality and tourism. This collection contains more than 828,000 records, with coverage dating as far back as 1965. There is full text for more than 480 publications, including periodicals, company & country reports, and books. Full-text periodicals include Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research, Current Issues in Tourism, Hotel & Motel Management, International Journal of Tourism Research, Journal of Ecotourism, Journal of Leisure Research, Journal of Sport Tourism, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Leisure Sciences, Leisure Studies, Nation's Restaurant News, Restaurant Business, Tourism & Hospitality Research, and many more. Sources are international in range and scope, with material collected from countries and regions such as Canada, Australia, Europe and Asia.

Sources cover areas such as:

·         Culinary Arts

·         Demographics & Statistics

·         Development & Investment

·         Food & Beverage Management

·         Hospitality Law

·         Hotel Management & Administrative Practices

·         Leisure & Business Travel

·         Technology

 

Jamaica Collection

 

The Jamaica collection consists of the catalogue entries held as far back as 1982. Over the years many of the sources have been digitized and can now be accessed in full text format using this database. Content include speeches, reports written and delivered by our tourism leaders, annual reports of the Board, tourism publications and other industry publications for which the JTB was a contributor. Some of the full text sources one can expect to find include:

·         Budget presentations

·         Annual reports of the Board

·         Reports to the JHTA

·         Speeches by Tourism Ministers and Directors

·         Thesis and research papers

·         Books published on the industry

 

Gleaner Company- Gleaner Archives

 

This online database contains more than 970,000 historical newspaper pages from The Gleaner. The full-page newspapers, dating back to 1834, are searchable by keyword and dates, making it easy and quick to explore historical content. The archives can be use used to gain local perspective on historical news, to compare events as they change over time and ensure that readers benefit from the information of the past.

 

Social and Economic Information Network- SECIN database

 

The SECIN portal is collaboration by all Special Libraries within the network.  It is a single point of access for social and economic content held by these units. The network comprises over seventy units within the government and private sectors of Jamaica. Some of the entities include:

•      Planning Institute of Jamaica

•      Statistical Institute of Jamaica

•      Bank of Jamaica

•      Grace Kennedy

•      Ministry of Finance

•      African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica

•      Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade

•      Jamaica Trade and Invest

•      Gleaner Company of Jamaica

•      Jamaica Information Service

•      Fiscal Services Limited

•      Jamaica National Commission for UNESCO

•      Ministry of Foreign Affairs

•      United States Information Service

 

 

Media Clippings On-line

 

The database currently over 2300 articles and represents the library’s efforts to have a fully digitized newspaper clippings archive. The collection contains clippings primarily from the two major newspapers and is updated each day. The database is searchable and returns full text PDF results to natural language words and phrases.

 

Image Library

 

The Image Library collection holds over 400 high resolution images representative of the tourism product throughout the six resort areas of the island. These images are provided free of cost to person interested in the tourism for purposes such as academic research support, signage and instruction aids among others. Some of the categories into which the images are organized are:

·         Adventure

·         Architecture

·         Art & Beaches Craft

·         Cuisine

·         Culture

·         Historic Sites

·         Spas & Baths

·         Scenery

·         Waterfalls

 

UNWTO E-Library

 

The e-unwto is a fully cross-searchable interactive database offering a vast number of high-quality UNWTO publications including books, journals, and statistics in their respective languages. In addition to more than 900 books in English, French, Spanish, Russian or Arabic, the e-unwto also provides access to a growing number of documents which can be defined as “Gray Literature”. The latest statistical information and aggregated data on inbound and outbound tourism are very conveniently presented within the “Tourism Factbook”.

 

Library services

 

The library is open to the public from both physical locations (Kingston and Montego Bay) Mondays to Fridays between the hours of 8:30-4:30. Limited photocopies are provided at a cost of $3.00 per page. Users of electronic resources are not permitted to insert external data drives into the machines. They are asked to create a research folder and email the contents for delivery.

The library can be reached at 929-9200 or at jtblibrary@visitjamaica.com. Users wishing to use the physical facilities are encouraged to contact us ahead of coming.

 

Library Affiliations

 

Library and Information Association of Jamaica- LIAJA

Audio-Visual Information Network- AVIN

Social and Economic Information Network- SECIN

 

 

Staffing

 

Matthew Blake MLIS, BBA

 Librarian

mblake@visitjamaica.com

908-5200

 

Wackene Pitters BSc

Assistant Librarian

wpitters@visitjamaica.com

908-5201