The cooperative services of information aim maximizing the attendance and satisfying the information demands and needs of VHL users. For this purpose different action lines centralized on promoting the use of information sources are implemented, such as development and update of the interfaces and search mechanisms of the VHL, capacitation of users, promotion activities and dissemination of the VHL and operation of Cooperative Service for Accessing Original Documents (SCAD).
The SCAD is the service of provision and exchange of copies of scientific documents, especially those referenced in the VHL information sources that aren’t accessible in full text and in electronic format. It was the first cooperative service that was operated by the Latin American network of health information and is in operation operating since 1967, date of creation of BIREME. Its operation occurs in a decentralized way in the Internet, being integrated with the collection of information sources of VHL. Use the collective catalog Serials on Health Sciences (SeCS) for automatic location of documents in libraries participants of VHL’s service.
Coordinated by BIREME, it has the participation of most countries in the region. The SCAD is accessible in portals of national and thematic instances of VHL, as well as, from bibliographic references of retrieved documents in the different sources of information. For more information about SCAD see http://scad.bvs.br/php/index.php?lang=en.