A citation analysis of the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association.
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Despite immense resources and a growing interest in education and libraries, library development in Kuwait has been restricted by the problems common to all developing countries. These include an overdose of bureaucracy, lack of trained librarians, and little perception of the library's importance in the educational system. Medical librarianship is virtually a new field. The only medical library of any significance in the country is the Faculty of Medicine Library established in 1974 to serve the newly organized Faculty of Medicine of Kuwait University. In recent years, the Faculty of Medicine Library has gone through several reassessments and many changes. It has expanded its collection, begun computerized searching, and recruited several professional librarians. Now semiautonomous from the university's Libraries Department and housed in a new, modern building, the library has the potential to become the main medical library in the Persian Gulf area.
In an analysis of the information requests received and recorded in the Cleveland Medical Library over a two-year period, the requests were classified in four groups according to whether they were direct inquiries (factual), indirect (subject), biographical and directory, or requests for verification of literature citations. An attempt was made to discover some of the major characteristics and the volume of activity in each class. The results reflect the information services supplied by a single library with its own unique clientele and functions, rather than provide a means of generalizing about information services in all libraries, although they may give us some useful insights. Detailed analyses are made of direct and of biographical and directory questions. The largest number of inquiries received were those in which literature references on a specified subject were requested (indirect inquiries); these represented over 50 percent of the total. Most of the requests in this category called for limited coverage (five articles or less) in the recent literature (not over five years). Requests for verification of citations ranked next with 25 percent of the total, followed by direct (factual) inquiries (12 percent) and biographical and directory inquiries (9 percent), although it is recognized that these last two classes are probably underrepresented in the sample.
Culture not only justifies the existence of libraries but also determines the level of funding libraries receive for development. Cultural appreciation of the importance of libraries encourages their funding; lack of such appreciation discourages it. Medical library development is driven by culture in general and the culture of physicians in particular. Nineteenth-century North American medical library funding reflected the impact of physician culture in three phases: (1) Before the dawn of anesthesia (1840s) and antisepsis (1860s), when the wisdom of elders contained in books was venerated, libraries were well supported. (2) In the last third of the nineteenth century, as modern medicine grew and as physicians emphasized the practical and the present, rather than books, support for medical libraries declined. (3) By the 1890s, this attitude had changed because physicians had come to realize that, without both old and new medical literature readily available, they could not keep up with rapidly changing current clinical practice or research. Thus, "The Medical Library Movement" heralded the turn of the century.
The purpose of a hospital medical library is described under the headings of diagnostic and treatment guide, current awareness and access to published literature. The Wessex Regional Library and Information Services is described.
Selected primarily for the small medical library, this list is compiled to serve as a practical guide for the librarian in developing and utilizing an effective reference collection. Arrangement is by broad subject groups; titles chosen are chiefly in English with geographic coverage limited to the United States and Canada. Texts in subject fields have been omitted since these are adequately covered in several comprehensive guides to the literature.
The paper traces the Medical Library's growth, development and its relationship with the Faculty of Medical Sciences (FMS), researchers and other users pursuing their teaching, research and patient care. The information is analyzed, synthesized and organized from the Annual Reports of the Vice Chancellor, Principal, Libraries, various Departments in the Faculty of Medical Sciences, Office of Planning, Institutional Research, and the Web Pages of University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.
QUESTION: What are some of the forces shaping the evolution of medical libraries, and where might they lead? DATA SOURCES: Published literature in the fields of library and information sciences, technology, health services research, and business was consulted. MAIN RESULTS: Medical libraries currently have a modest footprint in most consumers' personal health ecologies, the network of resources and activities they use to improve their health. They also occupy a relatively small space in the health care, information, and business ecologies of which they are a part. Several trends in knowledge discovery, technology, and social organizations point to ways in which the roles of medical libraries might grow and become more complex. CONCLUSION: As medical libraries evolve and reach out to previously underserved communities, an ecological approach can serve as a useful organizing framework for the forces shaping this evolution.
The internship program for medical librarians sponsored by the National Institutes of Health was begun in 1964 and was approved by the Medical Library Association. The program ensures a "planned and balanced development of...capabilities," and "an intensified, systematic, and broad working knowledge and understanding of all phases of librarianship." An outline of the program is provided.
A study was made of the serial holding statements in PHILSOM over a six-month period, in order to determine the desirability of printing the complete serial holding statements monthly. Attention was given to the frequency of internal and update changes in both active and dead entries. The results indicate that while sufficient activity is observed in active serial entries to warrant their monthly updating, dead serial entries remain constant over this period. This indicates that a large group of PHILSOM entries can be easily identified and isolated, facilitating division and independent updating of the resultant lists. The desirability of such a division, however, must also take into consideration the user's ease in handling such a segmented listing.
A two-year program in Medical Library Technology leading to the Associate in Applied Science degree was developed and approved by the State University of New York and the New York State Board of Regents as a joint endeavor of the Upstate Medical Center and the Onondaga Community College, with classes scheduled to begin in September 1969. The curriculum is designed to allow continuation of study towards the Bachelor of Science degree and includes a summer internship at one of several participating medical libraries. An increasing number of library technology programs are being offered by junior colleges in the U. S. and Canada. However, this represents a first attempt at a technician education program designed specifically for medical libraries.
This revised list of 472 books and 138 journals is intended as a selection guide for small or medium-sized hospital libraries or for the small medical library serving a specified clientele. It can also be used as a core list by small hospital library consortia. Books and journals are categorized by subject, with the books being followed by an author index and the journals by an alphabetical title listing. Items suggested for initial purchase by smaller libraries are indicated by an asterisk. To purchase the entire collection of books and to pay for annual subscriptions to all the journals would require an expenditure of about $18,200. The cost of only the asterisked items recommended for first purchase totals approximately $4,500.
The present problems facing medical libraries-budget cuts, the short-term nature of the renewal of the Medical Libraries Assistance Act, and lessened governmental aids to the health sciences research and training programs-are outlined, and six suggestions are made for helping to solve them.
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