The Current Status and Need Assessment of Professional Education for Medical Librarians in the Twenty-First Century

In Taiwan, there are approximately 400 medical libraries, and their primary users are mostly life science professionals, students and faculty of health science related departments, medical science researchers, and physicians. Their professional performance matters to the health and even lives of human beings. Therefore, it is vital that the medical librarian provides high quality of information services. However, most of the medical librarians have no health science or related disciplines education background; also, many of them with library and information science (LIS) degree never received courses related to medical librarianship while they were in the college; which highlights the importance of the continuing education of the medical librarians. This project will adopt research methods such as literature review, content analysis, questionnaire survey, and in-depth interviews to investigate the current status of the medical librarians’ professional education; and, based on the perspectives of librarians and the library directors, to discuss the requirement and the need of the continuing education. Professional education includes “academic curricula” and “continuing education”; but as there is quite little of medical librarianship related coursers in Taiwan’s LIS schools, we are planning to collect curricula of medical library related courses from LIS schools accredited by the American Library Association and those of the Medical Informatics Departments in medical colleges in China; and then carry out content analyses and comparisons. In addition, the last empirical research about the need assessment of medical librarians in Taiwan was in 1999. There are major changes within the past decade. Therefore, we plan to have this topic researched once again, hoping to sketch out the knowledge and skills that the medical librarians must have in the 21st century, and to be the reference on direction and content planning of the professional continuing education for the medical librarians, the medical library directors, the LIS schools, and the professional organizations of medical libraries.