National information network in medicine

Guest editorial

Jocelyn Anne Rankin, PhD, FMLA, 1946–2010

The journal in relation to library practice is one of the most important materials for self-education of medical librarians. The author surveyed the status of the journals held in member libraries of the Japan Medical Library Association in List of Current Periodicals Acquired by the Japanese Medical, Dental and Pharmaceutical Libraries, and counted citations of articles written by member librarians in Proceedings of the Workshop for Medical Librarians and Proceedings of the Seminar for Medical Librarians. It was found that the more member libraries hold the journal, the more frequently it is used by member librarians, and that 14 Japanese journals including Igaku Toshokan, Yakugaku Toshokan, Joho Kanri and Daigaku Toshokan Kenkyu, and 4 foreign ones including Bulletin of the Medical Library Association are essential ones for the medical library.

From the old days, a librarian has been expected to have some knowledge of the subject his library aimes to cover, and of one or two foreign languages, besides his knowledge of library science.It is not quite unusual today for someone with some natural science background and library science education to seek a job at a medical library. However, it would be yet an exceptional case, if a medical doctor becomes a professional librarian. Accordingly, a course of elementary knowledge in medical science and its terminology is necessary for education of medical librarians.About 60 per cent of the books and journals in medical libraries in Japan are in foreign languages. And English is predominant as an international language in the medical science fields.Besides the knowledge of general library science a medical librarian is expected to have additional knowledge of medical library administration and of medical bibliography.Because of the development of MEDLARS, medical libraries in the United States became more active in literature search and other information services. And the Knowledge relating to these activities is getting to be another necessary requirement for medical librarians.In Japan, a nation wide network of interlibrary loan service among medical libraries has been well established by the effort of the Japan Medical Library Association. However, but when it comes to information service, even though the International Medical Information Center, Inc. (IMIC) is handling more than 700 manual search requests a year, and the Japan Information Center for Science and Technology (JICST) began its service as a MEDLARS search center for this country from June 1972, no systematic (nation wide) service exists.Computer applications in various medical information activities are being developed rapidly, but the Japanese medical librarians are left behind of this development. In the United States, as is it was shown in the effort of the Curriculum Committee of the Special Interest Group/Education for Information Science of the American Society for Information Science in determining the core curriculum of education for librarians and information specialists, the need for more advanced information services which require the knowledge of behavior science, computer science, system theory, mathematics, linguistics and traditional library and information science is fully realized.The IMIC is providing the scientists and other workers in the field of health science with various information services, such as retrospective and current awareness literature search, translation, indexing, abstracting and other similar activities. The core of the knowledge needed for the staff of the IMIC are elementary knowledge of health science and its terminology, and English, in addition to the basic theory of library and information science. The skill and knowledge of literature search technology is also required for the people who work at the various sections of the Literature Information Service Division of the IMIC.Among other knowledge and skills considered necessary for the Center’s staff, elementary of system theory and of computer science are regarded as more important ones.At the moment, in Japan, no library school is teaching any special course for medical librarians, but the course is necessary if medical libraries are expected to serve their clients satisfactorily in the new field of information service.In the United States, in 1968, there were already 17 library schools offering some specialized courses for education of medical librarians. These courses can be classified into three groups; those designed to provide a general introduction to medical librarianship, those devoted primarily to medical bibliography, and those developed to provide instruction in depth in specialized aspects of medical librarianship.The School of Library and Information Science of Keio University at the moment does not provide any specialized course for education of medical librarians. When we think about the fact that more than one fifth of their graduates work at medical libraries, it would be desirable for the school to establish such courses for medical librarians as those presently given by some of the American library schools.

Mrs Lilian Sargeant MBE FLA 1907–98

The World Wide Web has dramatically altered landscape of information seeking in health. The provision of medical information has historically been business of medical librarians, and their principal clientele has been nurses, and allied health professionals, as well as students in those fields. Accordingly, for decades library schools have seen medical library science as an arcane specialty. The Web, however, has democratized access to health information. Searching for health topics online is now most popular consumer activity after use of email. In this paper, I discuss changes in healthcare information use effected by World Wide Web; give examples of integration of medical librarianship into generalist courses in library and information science (LIS) degree programs; and finally discuss challenges of integrating medical specialization into generalist teaching. Introduction Twenty years ago, in last published survey on this topic, Detlefsen and Gal vin found that 41 of 54 American Library Association (ALA)-accredited library and information science (LIS) degree programs offered at least one course in health sciences or biomedical librarianship.2 Despite apparently high regard for medical specialty in these schools, Detlefsen and Galvin were worried by their findings - not by number of courses offered, but by fact that in these 41 schools, only 25% of full-time faculty self-identified as having a health-related specialty. That is: 75% of these 41 programs were relying on adjuncts to teach, adjuncts who were typically working medical librarians. Adjunct numbers have important implications for specialty fields. Detlefsen and Galvin argued that adjuncts who are working practitioners have content expertise, but because of their position in educational institution, are less able to advocate for change and defend their specialty in curriculum. Because adjuncts typically have full-time employment elsewhere, they are subject to their own employers' needs and responsive to their employers' reward systems before those of schools and programs in which they teach. Full-time faculty, conversely, exist by definition to be full-time educators and not practitioners; and as full-time educators, they are rewarded for maintaining a presence on curriculum and admissions committees that influence training of future specialists and availability of future courses. Finally, full-time faculty members are charged with formal student advising. Adjunct faculty can and do have informal mentoring relationships with their students, but this is not typically considered an explicit function of their job. A May, 2006 review of ALA-accredited LIS program Web sites reveals that of 47 programs either fully or conditionally accredited, virtually all had either medical or health information courses listed in their catalogs, offered at least every 2 years. Twenty-three LIS programs (50%) report a total of 39 full-time faculty identifying either medical librarianship or medical informatics as a research interest.3 Although both medical informatics and medical librarianship focus on medical information, two are not synonymous. Medical informatics is generally defined as the rapidly developing scientific field that deals with biomedical information, data, and knowledge as it intersects with information technology.4 It is an extremely interdisciplinary domain, to which library and information science is one of many important contributing fields. However, medical informatics is dominated by clinicians. Membership in American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) includes physicians, nurses, dentists, biomedical engineers, medical librarians, researchers, scientists, educators, students and other health care professionals.5 This field, with its origins in medicine and computer science, demands a different, although occasionally overlapping, range of information technology competencies and training than does medical librarianship. …

Since the 1960's, the number of publications has increased at a phenomenal rate, and the introduction of the computer has resulted in greatly expanded technological advances in information processing and information access. The information delivery component of health sciences libraries has been transformed; and concomitantly, their interorganizational relations have been altered. This research investigates the impact of a federally mandated information program. The Medical Library Assistance Act was passed in 1965 to support the escalating information needs of health professionals. Also, a computerized access system for biomedical literature was introduced by the National Library of Medicine. This study focuses on health sciences libraries in the Pacific Northwest, primarily Oregon and Washington, from 1965 to 1985 to determine how the Act impacted them. Of the various theories in interorganizational relations, Raelin's legal-political model provides the most cogent framework. One of his two types of mandated networks results from society-at-large placing its will on a group of organizations through the enactment of a law. As a decision maker with a mandate, the National Library of Medicine has changed the relationships of health sciences libraries through a hierarchical network, the Regional Medical Library Program. This analysis is a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods and personal observation. Data were collected to determine the number of interlibrary loan transactions routed through the Regional Medical Library at the University of Washington and consortium grants from the National Library of Medicine. A survey of health sciences librarians in the Pacific Northwest was conducted to find out to which organizations they belonged, their familiarity with the Medical Library Assistance Act, and their first use of MEDLINE. The results show that interorganizational relations among health sciences libraries in the Pacific Northwest increased after passage of the Medical Library Assistance Act of 1965. The confluence of the establishment of the Regional Medical Library network with the development of a computerized database, MEDLINE, made this component of the Medical Library Assistance Act a resounding success. Information technology also changed a hierarchical structure to a more lateral one, whereby health sciences librarians at all levels perform their own on-line database searching.

The use of electronic information has been increasing in medical science. Medical students need to know how to get the information that they want. Medical librarians are specialists on medical information and must be able to help medical students find what they need. Consequently, medical school librarians should provide user education opportunities, including topics on information literacy in regular classes. Questionnaires were mailed to 80 medical school libraries. 72 libraries (90%) responded. In 45 of these libraries (62%), librarians are presently teaching user education in regular classes and in 8 of them (11%), librarians were teaching before. The major reason why the librarians had started to teach such classes was because of requests from teachers. In 17 of 53 libraries (32%), the librarians felt that teaching regular classes was very hard work because it takes much time to prepare for teaching. Most librarians are teaching medical literature retrieval. The results of the survey seem to show that most medical librarians wrestle with teaching user education in regular classes. Whether librarians continue to teach such topics in regular classes depends on the opinions of teachers and it is an important issue in future.

Medical libraries in the United States have been fortunate to have the National Library of Medicine (NLM) as an advocate for resource sharing. From the development of the Regional Medical Library (RML) program to the development of DOCLINE, the NLM, together with the National Network of Medical Libraries (NN/LM) has facilitated interlibrary loan and resource sharing. The EFTS (Electronic Fund Transfer System) was developed to automate the labor-intensive interlibrary loan functions of billing and paying invoices. With NLM's financial support and staff vision and technical support, the Electronic Fund Transfer System (EFTS), established at the University of Connecticut Health Center Library, has become the automated invoicing band payment component of DOCLINE for over 1,000 libraries in the US and Canada.

This paper gives a brief introduction to seven medical school libraries in Guangdong Province and points out that with the rapid economic development in this province, these medical libraries are more rapidly developing than those in other provinces in China.

The usefulness of MEDLINE searches conducted by a drug information pharmacist who had received online training was compared with the usefulness of searches conducted by medical librarians. Searches for literature pertinent to select drug information requests received at a university drug consultation service during a three-month period were conducted independently by the pharmacist and one of three reference librarians. The three librarians had received extensive online search training and were experienced in conducting MEDLINE searches; the pharmacist was trained by a fourth experienced librarian-searcher using National Library of Medicine (NLM) training materials. For each drug information request, the pharmacist and the librarian searched two MEDLINE files on the NLM service. The printouts generated by the two searchers were evaluated by two drug information pharmacists in terms of how useful each list of citations would be in enabling the drug information pharmacists to answer the related question. The majority of printouts in 48 sets of searches were judged to be useful. Of the 96 possible "best search" votes (two votes for each of the 48 sets of printouts), the pharmacist's searches received 34 votes, the librarians' searches received 28 votes, and there were 34 tie votes. The numbers of useful primary and alternate citations were found to be the best predictors of whether a given printout would receive the "best search" rating. MEDLINE searches performed by a drug information pharmacist with online training, in response to drug information requests, were judged by drug information pharmacists to be as useful as searches performed by librarians.

Elizabeth was born in

Chat reference services offer the opportunity to provide immediate access to quality information to meet the medical information needs of students, faculty, staff, physicians, nurses, and allied health care professionals. Part 1 of this two-part article on chat reference service in medical libraries is an introduction to the management of chat reference services and to features available for chat reference. The management of chat reference services raises issues of planning, staffing, selecting, and marketing. Planning issues focus on the identification of the users, the users' medical information needs, and the users' information-seeking behavior. Staffing issues relate to the selection of chat hours, the location of the chat service, and participation in collaborative agreements. Selecting chat software weighs the sophistication of the chat features against the related cost. Marketing uses techniques similar to traditional reference services and often begins slowly as chat expertise develops. Part 2 of the article discusses trends in chat reference services in medical libraries.

The first meeting of the Japan Medical Library Association was held at Niigata Medical College in 1927. The Niigata Medical College is now the Niigata University School of Medicine, and the library is the Asahimachi Library of Niigata University. At that time, three men at the Niigata Medical College Library did great jobs of recruiting staff members of four other colleges, Okayama, Chiba, Kanazawa, and Nagasaki medical colleges. The three men were Mr. Miyaji, the director, Mr. Kiyokawa, the chief administrator, and Mr. Watanabe, the librarian. This paper researched the character of these three men, who succeeded in holding the first meeting of the JMLA and developed the Association. It also researched the situation of other libraries in Japan in this period.

Medical librarians provide up-to-date medical information and contribute directly or indirectly to academic research. Recently, as the proportion of research support services has increased, more professional knowledge and skills are required for medical librarians. Among them, the systematic search service for systematic reviews using rigorous methodologies is a field where medical librarians can professionally play a role in minimizing the bias through highly sensitive searches and can be said to be an untact information service that can be expanded in New Normal. In order to prepare the basis for expanding the untact search service, we collected systematic reviews published in Korea and analyzed the current status of search strategies and a related survey was conducted on researchers to find out the service direction. In August 2021, a total of 5 databases were searched for Web of Science, PubMed, RISS, KoreaMed, and KMBASE, and 7 items were analyzed from 1,258 articles by Korean authors’ among biomedical science articles. In addition, a survey and analysis were conducted on 75 researchers who had experienced systematic reviews through the Google online questionnaire. It was possible to confirm the analysis results of the database analysis used to perform the search for prior research data, the selection of search terms, and the person who performed the search. And through the survey, it was possible to examine researchers’ perceptions of collaboration with medical librarians, their reasons, and contributions. Despite several limitations, through this study, it was confirmed that medical libraries should conduct and expand education and related services for researchers to search with high accuracy and effectively utilize databases. At the same time, medical librarians should actively engage in collaboration with researchers and strengthen their individual capacities in order to be recognized for their worthy contributions. It will also be very necessary to maintain close and continuous communication with researchers.