Selection for this discipline is designed to support education necessary to be eligible to practice as an occupational therapist with an MS degree in Occupational Therapy (OT). Three program tracks are offered: The BS/MS program is designed for undergraduate students to facilitate entrance into a one-year Master of Science program. The Entry-Level Master's program is designed for students who have earned a baccalaureate degree in a discipline other than occupational therapy. Also, the Occupational Therapy Department will continue to add new cohorts to its post-professional distance master's program on a yearly basis. The OT masters degree is offered both on campus and as a distance program. A majority of the materials considered for the collection should be easily available to distance students and faculty. All OT programs at SJSU rely on the evidence-based practice model.
The University Library serves as the University's main resource for this subject. The collection is enhanced by access to materials at other libraries through Interlibrary Loan Services and CSU+ programs. Interlibrary Loan Services and Electronic Reserves are a strong supporting factor for the Distance OT program.
The field of occupational therapy has an established literature based on models and theories significantly different from the medical model. However, some medical material is needed in the collection to support occupational therapy. Coordination is needed with Kinesiology, Nursing, Biology, Health Science, Communicative Disorders & Sciences, Social Work, and Psychology.
The collection also duplicates an extremely small number of materials found in the main branch of the San Jose Public Library. SJPL does not collect materials in Occupational Therapy and collects only general and consumer health material such as buyer’s guides for adaptive equipment, so there is little overlap. Little to no coordination is required with SJPL for occupational therapy.
Materials are purchased in the format that most effectively delivers the information needed by the discipline in both undergraduate and graduate coursework. Materials will generally be in the English language and will reflect current topics and updated evidence-based information. These aspects of occupational therapy are included: professional, clinical, diagnostic, treatment/intervention, and research and assessment methodology.
The strength of the Occupational Therapy collection lies in a relatively comprehensive collection of OT journals and databases: American Journal of Occupational Therapy and its British, Canadian, and Australian counterparts, Haworth and other journals in OT, CINAHL, Cochrane Reviews, Science Direct and Web of Science.
There is a growing body of electronic full-text journal resources for OT; the collection includes most titles.
Students in this major can use interlibrary loan services to request articles from expensive journals that the library does not subscribe to. Journal subscriptions are purchased in electronic format only. For more details about the collection, please refer to the Occupational Therapy research guide: https://libguides.sjsu.edu/octh.
According to Academic Senate Library Policy S15-10, periodic evaluations of the print collection are required to maintain the high quality of the academic collection, with the primary goals of improving the effectiveness of browsing and providing space for new acquisitions. Resources for the Occupational Therapy collection are selected after consulting with the faculty and from recommendations garnered from book reviews in databases such as Book Review Digest Plus, Choice Reviews, GOBI, and Doody's Core Titles.
The journals collection was assessed in 2018 to determine if new journals were needed; it was noted that several titles have been added or changed to online subscriptions in recent years. In addition, this title is recommended: OT Practice.