Administration and Management in Health Science Libraries

Citation

Guha, M. (2001), "Administration and Management in Health Science Libraries", Library Review, Vol. 50 No. 6, pp. 313-313. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2001.50.6.313.4

How the time slips by when you are enjoying yourself. It is 12 years since I last reviewed a copy of this. How much has changed since then. The Internet had not been heard of. We were still struggling with task of convincing our customers that the library catalogue could be put on “the computer”. Librarians were still acting as the interface between the customers and MEDLINE, and “journals” were all in print. In the field I cater for, psychiatry, a lot of patients were still in large long‐stay institutions, and therefore a large proportion of psychiatric library users were conveniently kept together where you could serve them easily rather than scattered through general hospitals and community health services all around the country. More parochially, the merger of the London medical schools and institutes with the general teaching colleges had not yet been mooted, and the National Health Service was, we thought, recovering from its last major management reorganisation. How many have there been since then?

And yet, on the other hand, how little has changed in the material which needed to go into this volume, or what I need to say about it. The Handbook of Medical Library Practice was originally published in 1942 as a single volume textbook designed to guide people with little formal training into the techniques needed for running medical libraries. As the years rolled by, the level of training required before getting into the position where you might need to start reading this has grown to the state where a high proportion of its US target readership have already got specialised doctorates or masters degrees in medical librarianship, and yet the book has grown from a single volume to a rolling series of eight. Part of this is, undoubtedly, prolixity. Administration and Management is the broadest and vaguest of the eight volumes, and is therefore the most at risk of relapsing into waffle. It is certainly the case that tighter editing would have produced a more compact book. Being a general handbook for trained staff, rather than a textbook, also lends itself to exhortation rather than instruction. Being financially illiterate myself, I turned eagerly to the chapter on Fiscal Management to find that “The health sciences librarian needs to know how to develop, present, and lobby for adequate budget support; plan for and allocate resources and engage in fund‐raising and entrepreneurial activities must beware of global economic trends that may affect the business of library management and carefully monitor trends in the climate in which the library operates”. I already know that I ought to know how to do this, but as I am not very good at it, I need training rather than exhortation.

Having said all this, however, the general discussions of the changing management environment, fiscal management, human resources management, marketing, technological transformation, planning, and the application of research provide a good basis for professional development in those areas. Quite reasonably, the emphasis is entirely on US practice, but as the rest of the world grows more and more Americanised this is not a major obstacle. For those of us operating in broom cupboards and odd corners of community health centres the chapter on “planning” makes particularly entertaining reading. The USA must, indeed, be a wonderful place if its hospital libraries really look like that.

At £380.00 a set, I can not imagine many English hospital libraries investing in this series. Those that do will not find a complete substitute for a staff library, by any many of means, but will find it to be a useful source of ideas.