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Health Sciences Librarians inAcademic Libraries: A BriefReview of Their DevelopingRoleMaurice Wakeham aa University Library , Anglia Ruskin University ,Essex, United KingdomPublished online: 21 Oct 2009.

To cite this article: Maurice Wakeham (2009) Health Sciences Librarians in AcademicLibraries: A Brief Review of Their Developing Role, New Review of AcademicLibrarianship, 15:2, 266-272, DOI: 10.1080/13614530903279237

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New Review of Academic Librarianship, 15:266–272, 2009Copyright C© 2009 Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1361-4533 print / 1740-7834 onlineDOI: 10.1080/13614530903279237

HEALTH SCIENCES LIBRARIANS IN ACADEMIC LIBRARIES:A BRIEF REVIEW OF THEIR DEVELOPING ROLE

MAURICE WAKEHAM

University Library, Anglia Ruskin University, Essex, United Kingdom

Information relating to health has been gathered since ancient times. Physiciansoften gathered their own books which were sometimes donated to create early med-ical libraries. The explosion of information, the demands of qualification accred-iting bodies and technological developments have also helped to promote the workof health libraries. The professionalization of health occupations has tended tomove the health library support from hospitals into academic settings. Librariansare increasingly concerned with promoting their services and teaching patrons touse library resources. While some health sciences librarians see the availabilityof health information on the internet as a threat, to those that can see ways toexploit it, it may serve to enhance their role.

Keywords: academic libraries, health sciences librianship, libraryhistory

Libraries are places, physical or virtual, where knowledge is gath-ered, organized and then made available to potential users.Health science libraries gather material of relevance to health ser-vice practitioners and related professionals. Some may be targetedat particular professions within that group, such as doctors ornurses, while some may also cater inclusively to a broader range ofhealth professionals, such as radiographers, dieticians, or a rangeof therapists and managers. Workers or volunteers in health re-lated fields may require not only clinical or medical informationbut also, for example, ethical, economic, educational, psycholog-ical, or management resources. Health librarians may find them-selves dealing with practitioners, students, researchers, and eventhe consumers of health service provision—patients, their friends,and relatives. Their roles have evolved in a number of ways to

Address correspondence to Maurice Wakeham, University Library, Anglia RuskinUniversity, Bishop Hall Lane, Chelmsford, Essex, CM11 2LT, UK. E-mail: maurice.wakeham@anglia.ac.uk

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Health Sciences Librarians in Academic Libraries 267

facilitate this. The library itself may be located within a hospi-tal, a surgery, or, increasingly as far as the user is concerned, insome ethereal virtual space contactable via a keyboard. Even ifnot actually located within a University, and many will be, mosthealth libraries will have organizational or managerial links withone.

This paper will seek to outline briefly the foundations of li-braries that deal with medical and health materials and how theyhave evolved into their current academic settings. It will indicatesome of the many roles, subjects, and types of people that thehealth library worker has to deal with today (University of BritishColumbia 2009).

Historical Context

Human beings have always had a fundamental interest in theirhealth. Recording details of health and ways of taking care ofit have always been important. Some of the earliest gatheringsof such writings have come to us, for example, in the form ofclay tablets from the library of King Assurbanipal or papyri pre-scriptions, over 3000 years old, from the Temple of Thoth inEgypt. Copies of the writings of the early physicians such asGalen and Hippocrates were passed down via the Islamic schoolsand libraries of Spain and the Middle East. Over time, medievalChristian monks took on the roles of scribes and carers of thesick. From the thirteenth century onwards materials were gath-ered in the universities where medical schools were founded, suchas Florence, Paris, and Aberdeen. The invention of printing ledto wider production of the classical texts, sometimes in Latin, butalso in the vernacular. Printing facilitated the rise of the scien-tific journal. With wider availability of information, physicians andothers began to discuss and exchange information through theformation of scientific societies. In London the Royal Society ofMedicine Library has its roots in the fifteenth century, while theRoyal College of Physicians has had a library from its foundationin 1518. The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh Librarywas founded in 1682 with a donation of “three shelfes [sic] full ofbooks.”

The first working medical library in the United States (US)was founded for the staff and students of Pennsylvania Hospital

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268 M. Wakeham

in 1762. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM),currently the world’s largest medical library, was created in 1956but had its roots in a small collection of books and journals in theoffice of the Surgeon General of the Army, enough to fill aroundthirty feet of shelving by 1840. The NLM now holds over 9 millionitems.

The phenomenal explosion of health related informationover the last century is just one of the contexts within whichhealth libraries now operate. The evolution of libraries servingthe health sector, in common with libraries in general, has seen amove from the librarian as a keeper of texts to a promoter of theuse of information derived from texts. The libraries reflect thechanges within society and the institutions through which healthcare is delivered. This development within US hospital librariesin the twentieth century was a product of the American Med-ical Association’s requirements for improving medical schools.Health library provision in many countries has been enhanced byprofessional award accrediting bodies and statutory regulatorsrecognizing the importance of access to research and the body ofknowledge by which diagnoses and treatments can be evidenced.The move of nursing into higher education in the United King-dom (UK) in the 1980s brought about a qualitative improvementin information provision for the mass of nurses. It changed whatlibraries stocked, where they were located, the nature of the staffthat ran them, and how they networked with one another (Wake-ham 2002). Though specialist libraries still exist, rather than pro-viding for an elite group of surgeons and clinicians, most hospital-based libraries are now multidisciplinary, serving a wide range ofprofessions.

Networking and Collaboration

Even with such developments, or perhaps because of them, li-brarians are aware of the limitations of their own collections.Most general hospital libraries belong to regional networks butnot all are formally linked to University libraries. They seem tohave a professional desire to gather together in order to share re-sources and knowledge (Palmer 1994; Wakeham 2008). One ofthe largest groups of the UK Chartered Institute for Information

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Health Sciences Librarians in Academic Libraries 269

Professionals (CILIP) is the Health Libraries Group, which datesback under various names to 1947. This in turn now has two sub-groups—Libraries for Nursing and IFM Healthcare, the InformationManagement sub-group—which also provide information and de-velopment activities for their members. In the US, the Associa-tion of Medical Librarians was established in 1898 to encouragethe foundation of public medical libraries, though today publiclibraries would only purchase general medical titles. Now calledthe Medical Library Association, it has 23 “sections” and 14 ge-ographic groups. The Association of Academic Health SciencesLibraries and Libraries in Medical Education also give support totheir members.

Collaborative groupings operate internationally, for examplethe European Association for Health Information and Libraries(EAHIL) or the Association for Health Information and Librariesin Africa (AHILA), and since 1953, through periodic meetingsof the ICML (International Congress of Medical Librarians). TheWorld Health Organization (WHO) has its own library and co-operates with major publishers, through the HINARI project, toprovide free or low cost access to health related literature in thedeveloping world. The WHO also works with the IFLA (Interna-tional Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) Healthand Biosciences Libraries Section. Charities such as Partnerships forHealth are concerned to promote the value of health libraries topeople in the developing world, where such libraries, if they existat all, are often inadequately staffed and provisioned (Walia andChadha 2007).

Developing the Role

The development of the evidence-based movement, changes incurricula, and in the delivery of the education of health profes-sionals from a didactic approach to more interactive methodssuch as enquiry based, or problem based learning, affects the na-ture of libraries. Librarians, particularly, but not exclusively in aca-demic libraries, are increasingly being called upon to develop theinformation literacy of students and, in an age of lifelong learn-ing and continuing professional development, experienced prac-titioners and researchers (Gannon Leary, Wakeham, and Walton2003; Perry and Kronenfeld 2005). In some settings librarians,

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270 M. Wakeham

sometimes called informationists in this context, are becom-ing part of the clinical team, available to provide informationon the ward (Davidoff and Florance 2000; Rankin, Canto, andGrefsheim 2008). In other cases, library services provide informa-tion directly to clinicians via mobile devices like Personal DigitalAssistants (PDAs) (Honeybourne, Sutton, and Ward 2006; Bur-nette and Dorsch 2006). Increasingly, they respond directly notonly to professionals but also to the needs of patients and the gen-eral public (Stahl 2001). They no longer provide just books andjournals but, over the years, have adopted a range of new tech-nologies. Microfiche, slides, and compact discs have come, and insome libraries gone, to be replaced by electronic social networks,blogs and wikis, and the World Wide Web (Wood 2007). The de-sire to provide 24/7 support leads some to provide services whichutilize the time differences around the world, such as the Chasingthe Sun service (Rockliff and Peterson 2007).

Libraries contribute at a national and international level tothe promotion of material. The National Library of Medicine,which has been indexing articles since the late nineteenth cen-tury, now makes its PubMed database and, through the PubMedCentral service, full text articles, freely available. The work of theCochrane collaboration, the NHS Centre for Reviews and Dissem-ination and the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Qual-ity, among others, benefit from librarians’ contributions to theproduction of systematic reviews and guidelines (McGowan andSampson 2005). In the twenty-first century UK librarians have con-tributed to the work of the National electronic Library for Health(NeLH) which became the National Library for Health, now ab-sorbed by NHS Evidence. To help with sifting the morass of un-controlled information which is the internet, librarians helpedcreate gateways to quality sites such as the Resource Discovery Net-work and OMNI (Organised Medical Networked Information)and their successor, Intute.

The story of academic health sciences librarianship sharesmuch with that of the profession in general. It reflects the de-mocratization of information access largely facilitated by techno-logical change which has occurred over the last century. Healthlibraries take many forms and each must target its services at theneeds of its users. The busy clinician has different needs from anenquiring student or patient. Libraries are no longer places where

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papyri are kept in jars on shelves. Library holdings are no longerisolated, protected by priestly guardians, but may be procuredregionally, nationally, or from anywhere in the world. Informa-tion must be promoted and shared with users who may need to betaught how to find and evaluate it. Health librarianship is partlyto do with gathering information, but it is increasingly concernedwith persuading users and potential users to value, and enablethem to use, the information to which the library has access.

To Sum Up

Health care today is often delivered by teams of professionals ina range of settings. They have a variety of needs in relation todifferent aspects of their role. Patients and prospective patientshave ever increasing demands and expectations. The scientific,medical, and basic research literature that is available grows ex-ponentially and is no longer the exclusive preserve of the expertprofessional. It is the task of health librarians to manage and fil-ter information for this range of users with multiple needs. Li-brarians do this as individuals or as members of teams. They maywork with scientists at the forefront of research or with poorlyinformed members of the public or both. Watstein (2004) out-lines the emerging roles of health sciences librarians and theircentrality to their institutional missions. In the UK and elsewhere,whether based in hospitals or higher education, health librariansare responding to the new challenges in similar ways. The librar-ian may be a mediator, a facilitator, a teacher, an advisor, a re-searcher, or all of these. Technology has freed libraries and librar-ians from the constraints of place and time and changed the wayeveryone relates to knowledge and information. It has not yet,however, replaced the academic health sciences librarian. Indeedit has, and continues, to support the expansion of their role.

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