Clinical librarianship (CL): a historical perspective

Abstract

Reviews the literature on clinical librarianship with particular reference to the historical perspective. While it is clear that some physicians are competent and satisfied users of new computer search systems, many more, unfortunately, are unaware of the potential time saving features and powerful search capabilities of their search systems. Health sciences librarians have been advocating the use of indexes and abstracts for as long as these products have been available and over 20 years ago, the National Library of Medicine pioneered online access to the literature with the introduction of Medlars online (Medline). The results of a Canadian survey indicated that doctors in Ontario, Canada made little use of Libraries because they had no time to search for information beyond that they could obtain quickly from colleagues or from reference material in their own collections. Other studies have found that the primary reason of a clear preference for hospital libraries, either medical school or medical society libraries where information was used for both clinical and research purposes, was that the library was the most important place of locating printed sources on which doctors still rely for browsing the literature.