Future of Medical Libraries

Abstract

Medical libraries in past could enjoy a fairly steady growth and also a confidence in their capability to meet the most needs of their users. But, this comfortable situation is rapidly fading into an uncertain but somewhat dynamic environment. There are two major factors that cause this change. One is a social trend to make health and medical information available to much more larger population than those of physicians, such as, para-medical people, patients, and even to general public. Another is, of course, the development of new technologies represented by computer application to library and information service.
In Japan, the former factor is not so explicitly observed yet, however, the latter is recently getting to be an urgent one.
There are two entirely different attitudes we can choose to take in coping with this change of environment. We may stick to our traditional role of a custodian of book collection, and let other new-comers in our field of information transfer, such as the university computer center, to take over our job as the major information service unit in health and medical fields. Or, we may struggle to remodel ourselves to be able to fit better in the new role as much more active and dynamic information agent that will be needed in this new health and medical environment.
And if we choose the latter way, then, it would be necessary for us to fortify ourselves by acquiring more of medical knowledge so that we can be admitted as one of the true members of health care team.