Health Information Management: : What Strategies?

Citation

Guha, M. (1998), "Health Information Management: : What Strategies?", Library Review, Vol. 47 No. 4, pp. 241-242. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.1998.47.4.241.5

I was not at this particular jamboree, mainly because I find that being in a large room full of medical librarians gives me what is known in professional psychiatric circles as a case of the screaming jimjams. The last time I risked going to anything on these lines I woke up at about 6 a.m. on the second day, with a skull‐splitting hangover, and walked out in the nearest I could approximate to a straight line for just under 30 miles across East Anglia, till I came across a station and took a train home. In fact it is just as well that I did not go to this one, because I suspect that 30 miles outside Coimbra in Portugal is probably not very good for public transport (and not very good for health information either, if it comes to that. As far as I can gather from this book, information stops in the city).

This aversion to my own kind in bulk is a pity, because obviously, a great deal of useful information can be exchanged on these occasions, and, though you can get something of the flavour of the occasion from scanning through a book of this sort, the published version is not really a useful or sensible way of disseminating this information. I have, very occasionally, come across conference proceedings that have translated successfully into books, but just slapping absolutely everything presented at a conference between hard covers and flogging the results off at 3p per page is not the way to do it.

There is quite a lot about the Internet here, and, in a curious sort of way, this book resembles the Internet. There is a vast range of interesting information, and an even vaster amount of trivia, but there is no evidence of any refereeing or editing, and no indexing ‐ I noticed a paper on the use of SwetScan when reading through this. The next day one of my colleagues asked me something about SwetScan, and it took me over five minutes of fumbling through the book before I found the paper again. If these contributions had been submitted to a library journal a very large proportion would have been sent back by referees. If they were rewritten into a publishable form, accepted, and published they would have been indexed, both in the journal and in easily‐accessible on‐line services. When authors had made the effort to contribute in English, in a language foreign to them, the editor would be expected to have made the corresponding effort to make sure that it was good, or at least comprehensible English.

McSean and Law, in their contribution here, say that “all is not well on the Internet. … the sheer volume and low quality of the available resources… will allow us, information professionals, to redefine our role”. It seems to me that the information professionals here, namely the editor and the publisher, had a clear, definable role of extracting a readable book from the sheer volume and low quality of the contributions to a conference, and, in this particular example, have failed to attempt to do so.