CILIP | Building the future of health libraries: first international workshop. Barcelona, July 2005

Building the future of health libraries: first international workshop, held in Barcelona July 7th – 8th 2005

I am grateful to Proquest for sponsoring my place at this conference, which was held in the beautiful setting of the UAB Casa Convalescència Meeting and Convention Centre in Barcelona and organised by Biblioteca Josep Laporte, a local co-operative organisation that works to improve access to health information.

The aim of the conference was to share experience and best practice. Delegates came from several European countries and from as far as Australia, USA and Japan. All the presentations were delivered in excellent English. The most striking feature of the event was the similarities in the challenges and the solutions around the world.

The present and future of health libraries and health information portals
Three presentations on the first day highlighted commonly shared influences:
• The changing role of patients and professionals in health care
• The changing information market
• The changing map and role of health libraries
• Expansion of digital libraries
• Costs of health information
• Quality versus quantity of information and the importance of peer review
The same speakers agreed what we can expect on the horizon:
• Increasing use of medical libraries by a wider range of people
• Information models around clinical pathways and access to knowledge via the electronic patient record
• Increasing use of evidence-based filters
• Further advances in technology (PDAs, wireless technology, etc)

The role of information specialists
Speakers from Catalonia and the USA’s National Library of Medicine suggested that:
• advanced literature searching to provide information for evidence-based medicine, practice guidelines and systematic reviews.
• an emphasis on management of technology and management of complexity
• ‘cross-training’ to equip librarians to be ‘informationists’ in a variety of settings including clinical, consumer health and research

The physician perspective
A doctor from Barcelona described the information he requires in a normal day, namely information on individual patients, information on local services for referrals, and knowledge about local social expectations, and professional information for practice and for keeping up-to-date. He highlighted the value of oral information obtained in the coffee room, in the lift and at conferences; the problem with print and digital information is its sheer quantity. He rated Google highly, and also the prepared searches on Medlineplus (http://medlineplus.gov/).

In the USA, health professionals encourage their patients to use Medlineplus by providing ‘information prescriptions’. Patients are encouraged to use the variety of stored searches available.

International experience of digital libraries
Presentations from England, Australia, Norway, Hungary, Japan and Latin America highlighted the following common themes:
• Consortium purchasing of core resources on a local, regional and national basis
• Enabling access to the resources and information in a variety of ways
• Providing training, promoting use and agreeing how librarians can best support users
• Collaborating with Higher Education Institutions, in order to improve access for hospital and community staff and students
• Supporting for evidence based practice
• Embracing the shift to open access publishing

A Caribbean case study
The situation in Latin America was described in more detail by Dr. Figueiredo Castro from the Biblioteca Regional de Medicna (BIREME). This organisation has members from all the countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, and supports joint projects and cooperation on technical issues. Its main projects are:
• Virtual Health Library www.bvsalud.org
• ScIELO Scientific Electronic Library Online www.scielo.org
• LILACS database – Latin America and Caribbean Literature on Health Sciences

The Virtual Health Library, which receives over a million visits each month, is hosted in three languages, involves 1700 institutions and embraces 70 portals. It aims to link explicit and tacit knowledge, and to link people via communities of practice. It also aims to encourage a re-structuring of information flows from the classic flow (whereby each element - author, publisher, library - occupies a separate space) to a knowledge-based environment that brings all elements together and supports open access publishing. This model has developed out of necessity, since authors from developing countries are not well represented in the mainstream literature, but is judged to have improved quality and access, and successfully brought together networks, producers, intermediaries and users to provide a framework for local information and knowledge management.
Knowledge Management
The final presentation illustrated how the host institution, Biblioteca Josep Laporte, is meeting its vision to merge traditional libraries, digital libraries and knowledge management for professionals and patients. They provide knowledge management centres for both professionals and patients, each offering similar services. Thus patients are also offered workshops, training courses and chat facilities.

My overall impression
Librarians are evidently responding to developments in technology and in publishing, the changing role of health professionals and the empowerment of patients, by taking the opportunity to develop their roles and move out of the library, whilst the global nature of the Internet means that sharing problems and lessons learnt is easier than ever before.

The presentations are available at http://www.fbjoseplaporte.org/healthlibrary/

Annette Thain, Cancer Knowledge Services Adviser, NHS Education for Scotland

Updated: 03 October 2005

Health Libraries

Building the future of health libraries: first international workshop, held in Barcelona July 7th – 8th 2005