Reference collections
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IntroductionSee also Reference services | Print ordering | Top Information Sources in Biomedicine, 2012 Canadian health librarians aim to collect materials from across a spectrum of patient care but operate within specific national political and social contexts. (see Canada's Health Act.) Most Canadian health librarians, for example, are employed by publicly-funded institutions or organizations that are governed by the principles of universal healthcare. These specific health care viewpoints and perspectives are grounded in our national health care values, and inform our building of library collections - ie. see recommendations for the future of health care in the Romanow report. There is a great deal of duplication in medical publishing. On the web, health information can be provided openly and freely in one place and then repackaged and resold for a profit elsewhere. Health librarians should be wary of this issue whenever they purchase new print or online tools. Simply put, last week's free, open access website can be next week's expensive aggregated database. Authority of medical information must be assessed closely. Commercial dot.com sites can lead to bogus or untrustworthy websites, and ultimately need to be compared against known, trusted sources of medical evidence. Health librarians should always be on the look-out for useful content to save money for our print and electronic budgets. It must be said that print materials are still needed in the digital age and are consulted often in health and medicine. Here are some of the major sources used to define words, decode abbreviations, find addresses or look up prescription drugs. Collection developmentSee Collection development in biomedicine The selection of print and electronic book and journal collections is one of the most important activities for health librarians. Some important issues that health librarians contend with include: overall scope of the collection; balancing print and electronic resources; free versus fee-based resources; determining differing content in print versus online versions; duplication of identical sources, multiple vendors, online access and authentication, adaptability of database interfaces and, of course, limited budgets. As physical libraries change from housing print collections to the almost totally electronic, the health librarian must find a way to perform collection outreach and liaison activities with user groups. One of the primary challenges for health librarians is the proliferation of biomedical knowledge due to advances in biomedical research. Changes in information cycles are often a result of the way physicians are trained, practice and carry out their research; ultimately, this has an impact on the maintenance of a knowledge-base in the different medical disciplines. (See also Print ordering and Brandon-Hill and Doody's Lists). Prices can also be found at the Canadian Login Brothers and, of course, Amazon.ca. Canadian contextA major challenge for Canadian health librarians is that Canadian perspectives in our reference collections are not as plentiful as we might like. One reason for this is that American and European medical publishers predominate. It is essential that Canadian materials (and viewpoints) are collected for balance in our reference and monograph collections. (See the grey literature). Some health professionals require Canadian, British or European perspectives for their work and they may want a national view of treatments, or because they are doing comparative analyses. Incidentally, the delivery of health care is rarely uniform across the globe, despite evidence-based commonalities. See also
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