A Core Medical Library for Practitioners in Community Hospitals

Abstract

IN an ongoing study designed in part to evaluate and encourage continuing education programs in community hospitals¹ Postgraduate Medical Institute (PMI)† has determined that there is need for guidance in the area of medical-library development. Reports from PMI physician consultants who visited more than 40 community hospitals indicate that medical-library facilities are generally poor and infrequently used by physicians. The basic weaknesses of these libraries fall into four categories: inadequate collections, inadequate personnel, inadequate space, and the absence of any practical indexing system to facilitate use of collections that do exist.Failure to deal with these problems does not reflect . . .