Editorial

HLG Nursing Bulletin Vol 36 (2)

Welcome to the latest issue of HLG Nursing Bulletin, which contains articles on a variety of topics that will be relevant to libraries and librarians, both directly involved in and around nursing, but also (we hope) to the wider community of library and information professionals. This is a special issue highlighting various aspects of the service provided and practices undertaken recently by our friends at the Royal College of Nursing Library and Archive Service.

Patron Driven Acquisition (PDA) is an increasingly used method of libraries figuring out which are the best books to buy for their collections, as, rather than the librarian trying to decide what should be procured, it is the users themselves knowing what they actually want. Rachel Sully discusses the RCN’s PDA project for the purchase of e-books.

The RCN library is a fully national service, thanks to the national nature of the organisation it represents. As a consequence, even though the library service has a handful of bases, the team needs to be out and about to serve the needs of its users. Philip Segall gives an idea of what the RCN team does to facilitate the access to its services to all of its members throughout England.

All library services, whether large or small, are increasingly complex, with an ever expanding range of materials for users to go through to find the best evidence for the topic that they’re after. The RCN is no exception, and so has introduced a series of subject guides that set out key resources in a wide range of clinical and non-clinical topics. Caroline Lynch sets out the process of developing the RCN’s web-based subject guides.

Wikipedia – the bogeyman of information retrieval. Or perhaps not. We all know that attempts are being made to improve the quality of material on Wikipedia, with the development of the “Wikipedian in Residence” role at many institutions, and the idea of the mass Wikipedia edit, with people shown how to go about editing the site, and then encouraged to go about editing it to improve what is there. Janan Nuri goes into one such event held at the RCN, to improve both the quantity and quality of pages about women on Wikipedia.

There is now an electronic archive of issues of HLG Nursing Bulletin’s predecessors, NIS Newsletter and LfN Bulletin, on the website. But, there are a number of issues missing, so we’d like your help with trying to find them, so that we can have a complete archive for you to peruse.

We’ve reintroduced our current awareness page, with relevant and interesting articles from a number of different sources. If you have seen anything that you think is interesting/useful/relevant, let us know.

As always, we’re on the lookout for articles on all topics. If you were at HLG and would like to write something we’d love to hear your thoughts. Or, if you have a new system in place, have implemented some new training regime, have a book you’d like to review, or just have an opinion on something in the world of nursing and healthcare libraries that you’d like to tell us, we’d love to hear from you. Details of how to contribute can be found at the end of this issue, or on the HLG Nursing website.

Phillip Barlow
HLG Nursing Bulletin editor