The number of nursing universities and colleges in Japan became 100 in 2002, which shows rapid academic development of nursing. However, unlike medicine, nursing has its own difficulty in developing through researches. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the characteristics of basic ideas of nursing, making a comparison between nursing history and the development of modern medicine. Especially, to establish nursing as an academic field, the knowledge-creating problem in nursing is discussed by citing the theory of organizational knowledge-creating that transforms practical/clinical knowledge, that is tacit knowledge, into theoretical knowledge, as well as the personal opinion on how to accumulate clinical knowledge and systematize them. Furthermore, the role of library is discussed in terms of accumulating and systematizing the results of nursing researches.

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This author discussed changes of background and environment for information services in professional activities. Under the development of information technology, the concept of access has changed. Linguistic and conceptual accesses are required in addition to bibliographic and phisical accesses in information services. This means the objectives of information services has moved to services for the customers' and clients' satisfaction from services of relevant information delivery. For this purpose, value-added processing in information services are required and have to be reflected on the ways of information presentation and supply. These changes are enable to realize by information professionals with highly specialized qualities of personality and skills to be educated in the professional school.

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The purpose of this report is to clarify the problem in developing the bibliographic instruction programs at the Library, St. Luke's College of Nursing. The past programs were analyzed based on the guideline by the Committee on User Education, Japan Library Association. As a result, main problems are that the goals of each instruction program are not clear and that the members of the library don't share them, because they are not stipulated.

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Our library services for inpatients and their families started at Hamamatsu Red Cross Hospital in March, 1999. The services are offered by the librarian at the medical library in this hospital, once a week almost every Wednesday at the lecture room in our hospital. We provide human health information and lend books, compact disks, etc. We lend photographical books and art books, especially to the patients under the palliative care in order to make them feel comfortable and peaceful. One of our future plans is to expand these services to outpatients every weekday. For this purpose, we need to secure a room for this.

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