The Japan Nursing Library Association was established in 1991. With the aim of determining the status of its member libraries, a questionnaire survey was conducted in November 1991. The questionnaire was sent to 27 member libraries affiliated with departments of nursing or faculties of nursing of universities and junior colleges in the Kanto district. Fifteen of the seventeen questionnaires completed and returned were analyzed. Two questionnaires returned by libraries shared with the school of medicine were discarded. The results of the survey reveal that there is a considerable difference in size and service among the member libraries, and it would be difficult to establish a nationwide association network.

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The Japanese Red Cross Administrative Nursing Course is a postgraduate nursing course. Nurses who have had at least five year of experience are allowed to participate in the yearlong course. Lectures were given five times. It is a group session. I let the students choose their own group topic and submit in a report later. Afterwards I checked their understanding of the lectures in order to determine how effective they were. Among the results, only 5% of them answered “I learned about information retrieval in my school days”, about 86% answered “the lecture time was adequate”, 68% answered “the lectures were a little difficult”, and in spite of that 82% answered “the lectures were usefull”, “After this course, will you teach at a hospital or school?” 54% of them answered “I probably can”, and few students answered “possibly”. It is important to study information retrieval in nursing education. So, learning about information retrieval is expected in the basic nursing education stage. We also need to acquire knowledge about it on the graduate level as well.

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The AAMC library study was conceived in 1979 by Marjorie P. Wilson, M. D. A major aim of the study was to inform academic medical center leaders of the key strategic issues in academic information management coming over the next several decades as electronic technologies would spread, then permeate and finally change our educational and health care institutions. Another aim was to describe how libraries could and should play a major role in the development and management of biomedical information. The National Library of Medicine IAIMS program supported the implementation of some of the report's recommendations at 17 institutions and organizations. The experience of these innovators will benefit us all as we enter the next decade of turbulent restructuring of our academic programs and scholarly communication systems. Between now and the end of the century we will see widespread much improved interfaces between humans and machines, high volume transfer of multimedia forms of knowledge between people and databases, and a shift from data dominance to knowledge dominance.

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The new library of Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine opened in May of this year. At that time, the card catalogues were done away with and OPAC (Online Public Accessable Catalogues) was introduced. In addition, CD-ROM MEDLINE by SilverPlatter and CD-ROM Igaku Chuo Zasshi have also been introduced. These are being used more frequently than we expected. Observing the end-user's access behavior toward the literature required, I became aware that they are searching in-house holdings on OPAC after searching the articles required on CD-ROM databases. These two searching behaviors are performed by users separately, but actually these two are closely related. So the unity of CD-ROM and OPAC searching may be the most desirable for them. In this article I show how to print a list of references retrieved on CD-ROM MEDLINE with our library's in-house holding information.

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The hospital library network has to train hospital librarians. The Council of Hospital Libraries in Shizuoka Prefecture, a regional network, has training meetings twice a year. The regional hospital library network has recently started another training program for hospital librarians. In order to discuss and study the many things which have to be dealt with in their routine work, the librarians of the Hamamatsu University School of Medicine and hospital librarians in Hamamatsu have held other bimonthly meetings, “training of hospital librarians in Hamamatsu”, since February of 1988. The latter training sessions have been very useful for both the university librarians and the hospital librarians. A report of the results of the sessions appeared in the bulletin of the Council of Hospital Libraries in Shizuoka Prefecture, “Booktruck”, Good connections have been established because of such sessions, and regional network activities have been furthered. Hospital librarians in central and eastern Shizuoka Prefecture have also established independent training sessions. In order to raise quality of library services, it is useful to develop the educational system for hospital librarians by allowing them to meet, discuss and study together the problems they confront in their routine work.

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