日本の医学図書館員教育の半世紀をかえりみて

抄録

The Japan Medical Library Association (JMLA) was originally founded as consortium of medical libraries to enable them to borrow books and journals from each other. In spite of its origin, by continuously providing various training courses the Association has been making a great effort to educate not only the staff of member libraries but other librarians in related fields. Because of the lack of a national library for medicine in Japan, the JMLA has been forced to play two different roles: (1) operating a nationwide consortium of medical and dental libraries, and (2) providing an association for professional medical librarians. The JMLA had been fulfilling these two roles fairly well until around the 1960s, when the rapid development of computer technology altered the situation, and we are just now becoming aware of the existence of staggering difference in the level of professional activities from those of health science librarians and information specialists in the United States. We shall have to use every means at our disposal to close this gap.