Changing Roles and Contexts for Health Library and Information Professionals

Citation

Guha, M. (2012), "Changing Roles and Contexts for Health Library and Information Professionals", Library Review, Vol. 61 No. 6, pp. 475-477. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242531211284393

I gave up being a health library and information professional four years ago (after over forty years of it). Since then I have spent my time philosophizing (They pay me! – the Maudsley Philosophy Group was founded by junior doctors who were under the mistaken apprehension that old men with arts degrees must know something), editing (the Journal of Mental Health ditto) and, most improbably, singer/song‐writing. I only meet ex‐colleagues at retirement parties or funerals, neither of which readily lend themselves to exchanges of professional experience or methodological updating. I have the occasional apocalyptic dream that one day every computer in the world will die simultaneously and the cry will go up for anyone who actually knows how to use the Surgeon‐General's Index Catalog but, realistically, the trends which were well underway when I retired seem likely to continue, speeding up if anything. I was therefore quite keen to take up this little volume, to see what has been happening in my absence.

The very first thing that struck me is that, for an updating book with a 2012 year of publication, this is not as up‐to‐date as it might be. The first chapter says “By the end of 2010 we should be able to judge […]” I know from bitter experience how difficult it is to get multiple contributors to submit on schedule, and what delays publishers can impose, but for one of the editors to put that on the first page is really offering a hostage to fortune.

This book is about changing roles and contexts. Roles, of course, follow context and are the result of context. The context, in this case, must include the broader political and economic situation, the narrower health and educational administrative situation, changes in individual expectation, and, above all, changing technologies.

I was disappointed that there is very little mention here of the broader situation: it seems clear to me that the financial crisis of 2008 resulted in a long‐term lowering of living standards in the western world, and that this will particularly affect what we once proudly referred to as “public services”. Long‐term may even mean permanent. Civilizations have declined and fallen before now. If we take civilization to mean the public care for and well‐being of the individual citizen, the past half‐century may come to be seen as the climax of western civilization. Any decline in public welfare is bound to involve economising on information middlemen.

More attention is given in the first part of this book, “Contexts”, to the immediate administrative situation, concentrating particularly on the British National Health Service. At the moment of writing, the future of the government's immediate proposals for reorganisation is uncertain, but it seems likely that the result will be a more fragmented and more commercially‐oriented organisation, with both the clinicians and the managers/owners more acutely aware of all intermediate expenditure. Librarians are in danger of becoming part of the “squeezed middle”.

Medical techniques are changing. There is a move towards evidence‐based medicine, which is clearly information‐reliant. People are messy however: they are all different, as pointed out here in an excellent short paper using clinical decisions on heparin treatment as an illustration. Tailored treatment based on the individual's genetic make‐up is less likely to make use of general all‐round information middlemen. Changes in information technology are likely to affect the work both of information staff and of clinicians – the Journal of Mental Health, for example, is producing an entire special issue on e‐health, considering systems which may be more effective than human interventions (Musiat, 2012) and online services which may replace human therapists (Bauer, 2012). These changes seem to indicate a need for clinicians to be better trained in information‐handling for themselves (discussed here by Neil Ford in a brief paper on changes in higher education) but, again, a lesser role for intermediary staff.

Above all, expectations are changing. The informed patient used to be a bizarre oddity. Medical information was a channelled resource, locked away in books and journals guarded by a middleman – me. Increasingly now, people expect to be able to get information for themselves, and, increasingly, information (and misinformation) is freely available for them. The Journal of Mental Health, and, come to think of it, the Library Review, is becoming an anachronism. (You can see a free sample issue of the JMH at http://informahealthcare.com/toc/jmh/19/4 and read a review of the diagnostic literature (Guha, 2010) if you like, but mostly it is only available if paid for.) The enormous amount of free mental health misinformation available online is increasingly being supplemented by useful and accurate free services, and anyone who wants to look at reviews of books on diagnosis can do it for themselves on Amazon – who needs travel writers when they have TripAdvisor?

The second half of the book is concerned with roles, starting with a general discussion of librarians' skills and competencies, leading into the librarian as information provider and educator; the librarian as information analyst; an assortment of brief case studies of the work of information specialists; and finally, the librarian as decision maker (that is to say, the librarian as library manager, rather than the librarian taking part in clinical decision‐making).

This book consists entirely of brief optimistic papers and case studies. I am not convinced by the optimism. There is no mention of redundancies here – my feelings are possibly coloured by the number of early retirements among my erstwhile juniors, but it seems to me that the future will demand a very much smaller number of very much more highly skilled staff than this book suggests. There are no unsuccessful case studies, even though the editors admit the value of learning from failure. The brevity irritated me – having 35 contributions in a book this size seems unnecessary. This, again, may be a sign of age: a solid slab of prose written by one or two people feels comfortable to me but off‐putting to many, while an anthology of short contributions feels bitty and irritating to me but presumably more satisfactory to many. The next stage will presumably be a “book” consisting entirely of Twitter entries where anyone with an interest can make a contribution – but then how much of a role will there be for the editorial expert?

The blurb says that “this comprehensive text will be essential reading for information workers […]” It is not, of course, comprehensive, and it is by no means essential reading. However, it contains some useful ideas and informative cases. Students on librarianship and information courses can be recommended to glance through it for an optimistic look at the world they may be entering. I am still mourning the world in which their equivalents could be reasonably sure of finding something interesting and useful to do.