ELECTRONIC AGE, CONSORTIA & DETERMINATION OF HEALTH SCIENCE LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SERVICES STANDARDS.

Transcription

1 ELECTRONIC AGE, CONSORTIA & DETERMINATION OF HEALTH SCIENCE LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SERVICES STANDARDS. DR. N.C.GHATAK, LIBRARIAN INSTITUTE OF PHARMACY, KALYANI, NADIA WEST BENGAL ABSTRACT:- Standards for the organization & dissemination of Health science Library & Information services in digital era is discussed. Maintaining standards & through consortia based library services its efficacy is increased which is stated here. INTRODUCTION Health science libraries and information services are important for the healthcare service provider, Doctors & other paramedical staff, Pharmacists, Nurses, Laboratory technicians etc. There is a lack of standard at the present health science library services, though some are fully equipped and providing best services & we should try to uplift standard as a whole. In the area of library services, standards determined as Quantity-- like Infrastructure, Professional status of staff & Document collection. Standards like Uniformity, Interoperability, and Sharing of encoded textual information are treated as technical digital library standard. Explosion of digital document in various forms demanding for determining the standard. Metadata and digital formats need standard. Many publishers have developed a framework for consistency & interoperability for digital archival repository of electronic journals. Other standards Medical Library Association (MLA), USA has developed standards for the Health science libraries & updating it regularly. Health On Net Code (HON Code) -- Pioneer in the field of Health information ethics. HON first introduced a code of conduct for medical & health websites.it is followed by 3000 websites worldwide. In India Medical Library Association of India, New Delhi formed a standard in the workshop at New Delhi in 1983, sponsored by The Medical Council of India. It is neither followed nor adopted in any health science library. It is now obsolete. In digital age the most important point is skill for integration of information services are searching & filtering of information. It requires skill of Subject knowledge base of a Librarian & it is most important. With reference to this parameter, standards of Health science Library should be as follows:-- 1. Health science library infrastructure standards. 2. Technical standards.3.academic & Expertise development standards. 4. Digital Library standards. Health science library infrastructure standards: This point stresses on qualification & status of medical librarian. Medical librarian must work independently as the head of the library. Hutchison et al (1981) pointed out,

2 2. The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals (JCAH), USA, it places equal & specific emphasis on the ten following points Administration. 2. Qualification of the library staff. 3. Continuing education for the library staff. 4. Requirement for library advisory committee.5.required library services. 6. Required library space. 7. Library Budget. 8. Library networking & consortium based library services. 9. Documentation of library policy. 10. Continuous evaluation of Health science library services. Most of these standards were pre digital era, so these are now backdated. Medical Library Association (MLA), USA has updated the standards in The MLA standards recommendations are as follows:-- 1 ADMINISTRATION The Health science library will serve independently to meet the information requirements of the organization. It will meet the Knowledge Based Information (KBI). The library must have its own budget. The librarian as the head of the library report to the senior management of the organization. 2. QUALIFICATION OF LIBRARY STAFF:--Professionally qualified librarian must direct the KBI systems & services. Staff strength will be as per need of the concern. 3. CONTINUING EDUCATION OF THE LIBRARY STAFF:- The library staff must take part in continuing education and gain the recent advanced knowledge. 4. LIBRARY ADVISORY COMMITTEE:- The Librarian as the key KBI professional of the library must work efficiently and actively and accept the recommendation of the library advisory committee and implement it as per need of the clients. 5.REQUIRED LIBRARY SERVICES:-- Librarian must perform his duties as per knowledge base information & take care of patient care, patient educating services, patient safety needs and functions as per need of the patients.educational functions of the institute & other appropriate functions as per need of the concern as and when required. 6.LIBRARY SPACE :-- To meet the need of the information the librarian asses the KBI needs and do accordingly, provide required library space to cope up with the needs of the clients with the resources, services to fulfill the proper needs. 7. LIBRARY BUDGET: -- The library must have its required budget to fulfill the need of the clients promoting KBI services & resources from its planned library budget. 8.LIBRARY NETWORK & CONSORTIUM :-- To perform all the KBI services there must be networking of libraries & consortium to serve the clients effectively through this consortia in compliance with the applicable federal, state, local & regional laws and regulations and it will provide information round the clock 9.DOCUMENTATION OF THE LIBRARY POLICY :-- The Health science library policy must be well documented.following this policy the librarian will provide KBI to the clients as per demand & it will be available day and night. 10.CONTINUOUS EVALUATON OF LIBRARY SERVICES:- The Librarian must evaluate its services provided to the clients & update it to fulfill the shortcomings of

3 3. Library services with its equipped Hardware & Software & other resources available. To achieve excellent Health science library services, Medical libraries must understand and adopt the popular suitable technical standards relevant to the health science librarianship, updating its standards. TECHNICAL STANDARDS:-- National Library of Medicine (NLM), USA has developed standards in all aspects of library services like acquisition, organization, abstracting and indexing. Notable technical standards are NLM Scheme of classification, Medical subject heading (MESH), & MEDLINE Databases, it is called as PUBMED. It is free of cost abstracts, articles, E-journals etc. The NLM has developed a tool named as UMLS. It provides health information & public health data. UNIFIED MEDICAL LANGUAGE SYSTEM (UMLS):-- It provides published medical information. UMLS is providing medical information, create, process, retrieve, integrate and aggregate health data & information & informatics research. There are three UMLS knowledge resources A. Metathesaurus. B. Semantic Network. C. Specialist Lexicon. These facilitate the use of health information through programmed tools. A.META THESAURUS It is a multilingual multipurpose large vocabulary database. It contains biomedical & health information, their various names & relationship among them.it is built from different thesauri, classification code, terms used in patient care,public health statistics, indexing & cataloguing biomedical literature, clinical health science research etc. B.SEMANTIC NETWORK-Through it the ideas are classified to maintain UMLS Metathesaurus through necessary classification & arrangements of ideas by their correlation. At present there are135 SEMANTICS & 54 RELATIONSHIPS types related ideas exist. C. SPECIALIST LEXICON & LEXICAL PROGRAMMES: -- It is made from the biomedical terms & the English terms used by the general people. Through Natural Language Processing System (NLPS) the experts gather ideas & collect terms through this Specialist Lexicon & Lexical Programs. INTIGRATED ACADEMIC INFORMATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS (IAIMS):-- NLM has developed this system. It provides technology assisted learning centre, informatics program development, teleconferencing, voice mail, resource sharing etc.

4 4. STANDARDS FOR ACADEMIC AND EXPERTISE DEVELOPMENT:-- Academic standard is the most important to the medical librarian for its value added services to the clients for clinical research support to the health care community. Knowledge of the medical librarians about the content of resources and its dissemination to the doctors & others is very important. Use of Information technology to acquire, organize, disseminate information & evaluation of services, are the main work of the medical librarians. For achieving excellence in medical Librarianship, Research & Development work must be done in this area creating an apex body in Medical librarianship. BIOMEDICAL INFORMATICS FOR THE MEDICAL LIBRARIANS:-- Application of Information Technology has changed the role of the Medical Librarians & also the information searching process of the clients. Digital Library concentrates on the integration of Electronic Health Records, Medical Imaging, and Telemedicine. Medical librarian must know the Medical Informatics, various aspects of Hardware & Software, Networking of various libraries. Content analysis, indexing of digital resources must be known to the medical librarian. DIGITAL LIBRARY STANDARDS:-- Digital library standard depends upon the organization of knowledge, storage and its dissemination with proper Meta data. There are many international standards for the digital libraries applications. These are MARC (Machine Readable Catalogue), Cataloguing rules & classification schemes. Resource description formats: -- There are many resource description standards such as MARC 21 for descriptive metadata about information item. MARC-XML for MARC21 data in the XML structure. MODS (Metadata Object Description Standard) It is XML of selected metadata from existing MARC 21 records and original resource description for encoding finding aids. Digital Library Standards:-METS (Metadata Encoding & Transmission Standards):-- Structure for encoding descriptive, administrative & structural metadata -- Core element sets Basic metadata elements for digital objects & MIX- Metadata for Images in XML. Information Resource Retrieval Protocols:-- Z39.50 supports information retrieval among different information system. It helps in inter-operability of different records of MARC message exchange between server & client.. This protocol helps in information retrieval, sorting duplicate records & removes these from the records.

5 5. STANDARDS FOR MEDICAL INFORMATION ON THE INTERNET:-- Everything is published on the Internet. So internet is now a garbage & information is sorted out of this Internet garbage & it takes time.. The solution is recommended by the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, called PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection) It applies labels to be applied to Internet content. It has developed a PICS-confirm rating vocabulary for the Medical information. It is called MED-PICS. It is expected that the web authors must use Med-PICS labels to describe their websites with standard vocabulary, to facilitate searching the webs. CONCLUSION:-- Application of IT with the substantial, organized cooperative initiatives from the Librarians, Publishers, and Medical professionals working together will evolve a suitable standard. Library services are cooperative and contracted arrangements to provide information resources in any form Electronic or print form and it will be available round the clock and consortia based services will be able to provide value added services to the clients. REFERENCES:-- 1. Medical Library Association of India ( MLAI )-Application & operation standards for health science libraries in digital era : Proceedings of the National convention of MLAI, 7-9 th November, 2005.Bangalore, National Institute of Mental Health & Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS) Paradise, Andrew (2004) Why the Joint Commission Accreditation of health Organization should add new regulations regarding libraries. Journal of Medical Library Association, 92(2): ,April Bhatt, M.K., Anand, S.K. & Dhir,S.C. Editors,-1983 Standards for Health Science Libraries in India. Medical Library association of India, sponsored by medical Council of India & National Medical Library, New Delhi, th October, 1983, New Delhi. 6. Hutchison. AP et al ( 1981 ) Proposed standards for professional health science library services in hospitals of New York State, Bulletin of Medical Library Association, 69(3) July,

6 6. Dr. Nibedita Ganguly Kalyani Deputy Librarian, Library, Documentation & Information Science Division Indian Statistical Institute 203, B.T. Road Kolkata Sub:-Submission of paper for the edited volume of the proceedings of ISI Respected Madam, I, Dr. N.C.Ghatak, Librarian, Institute of Pharmacy, Kalyani, Nadia am Submitting this paper to publish it in your Institute proceedings. The title of my Paper is ELECTRONIC AGE, CONSORTIA & DETERMINATION OF HEALTH SCIENCE LIBRARY & INFORMATION SERVICES STANDARDS. I think it will be published in the ISI proceedings and Health science Library standards will be highlighted as a whole, so that we can proceed further to Achieve international standards through practices & implementation. Thanking you with regards, Sincerely yours, n.c.ghatak (Dr.N.C.GHATAK) Librarian, INSTITUTE OF PHARMACY. Kalyani, Nadia, West Bengal ncghatak30@hotmail.com