The librarian in today's medical and health fields livesin a fast-paced and ever-changing environment.Reaching this modern, technology-driven librarywas a long and difficult road that had many bumpsand retreats. Hope was never the issue; keeping pacewas the challenge.The purpose of this introduction to the Journal of theMedical Library Association special issue on ''NewRoles for Health Sciences Librarians'' is to explore thework and responsibilities of the medical librarian aslibraries moved from the manual to the digitalenvironment over a period of seventy years (for areview of more recent developments, see Cooper andCrum in this issue). What the librarian of the 1940sand 1950s did and what the librarian needed to knowwas outlined by the profession's best practitioners ofthat time in the first Handbook of Medical LibraryPractice [1], developed by a committee of the MedicalLibrary Association in 1943. The model of the libraryprofession as described in this manual was thetraditional one, a model that had been the same formany centuries. And it continued to follow thatpattern for the next two decades. Janet Doe, the editorof the Handbook, outlined the goal of this seminalwork as showing ''those aspects of clientele, physicalequipment, literature, methods and bibliographictools in which the medical library differs from thegeneral library'' [2]. Included were chapters onadministration, book and journal selection, catalog-ing/classification, reference, and history of medicine.Much of what is described in 1943 is continued inhealth sciences libraries today. The major differencesare the way that information and knowledge arecreated and delivered and the skills that practicinglibrarians need.
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