A Core Medical Library for Practitioners in Community Hospitals

IN an ongoing study designed in part to evaluate and encourage continuing education programs in community hospitals1 Postgraduate Medical Institute (PMI)† has determined that there is need for guidance in the area of medical-library development. Reports from PMI physician consultants who visited more than 40 community hospitals indicate that medical-library facilities are generally poor and infrequently used by physicians. The basic weaknesses of these libraries fall into four categories: inadequate collections, inadequate personnel, inadequate space, and the absence of any practical indexing system to facilitate use of collections that do exist.Failure to deal with these problems does not reflect . . .