Orientation in the Medical Library: Training the New Librarian Assigned to Medical Library

摘要

BY THIS time, the last day of the Convention, most of you probably feel that you have heard enough papers and discussions to last for at least a decade. Therefore, it is with considerable timidity that I presume to add to your burdens. However, I hope that because you have not heard too much about medical libraries that you will be patient with my remarks. Since I am not a hospital librarian, I am not familiar with the intricacies of hospital organization, but as the clientele of any medical library consists of full fledged physicians or physicians in-the-making, problems in all medical libraries are similar. Most of us are so busy trying to keep up with the mass of detail that the orientation of a new medical librarian does not get the attention it should. But we all wish we could do more than we do for the new medical librarian. Whether in a medical school, society, or hospital library, we are likely to get assistants who are unfamiliar with a medical library. Therefore the training of new assistants is a more time consuming task than it usually is in other libraries.