Quinquennial Hospital Library Survey

It is printed on bright pink paper, so it will be visible from any stack, but we hope you won't put it down. We hope that you will complete it and send it back to us right away because IT is the PSRML Hospital Evaluation Survey! This rare survey appears every five years and is only sent to hospital members of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine/Pacific Southwest Region. The data collected from the Network's hospital members offer PSRML an opportunity to mark changes and trends in staffing, collections, services, and organization.

Since 1984, PSRML has been collecting information on the hospital libraries in the region and publishing its findings. Region 7 hospitals are the only ones in the nation that have been tracked in such a long-term study.

Access to information in hospitals has been changing:

Between 1984 and 1989 the number of librarians with professional degrees decreased, but the next five years found the numbers going up again.
Although physicians have remained the largest group using the hospital library, over the last ten years the percentage has been going down. The percentage of nurses, administrators, and especially health sciences students using the library has been increasing.
In 1989, just over 20% of the respondents were offering consumer health resources or end user training for online searching. Five years later, the percentage approached 50%. We expect that this year's survey will show an even greater prevalence of consumer health collections and end-user training.

If you work in a hospital and the library did not receive a survey, please contact PSRML. The information on every hospital library is very important! Please complete the survey and return it to PSRML by January 14, 2000.

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