PREPARING LIBRARIANS TO MEET THE CHALLENGES OF TODAYS HEALTH-CARE ENVIRONMENT

Objective: Refine the understanding of the desirable skills for health sciences Librarians as a basis for developing a training program mode l that reflects the fundamental changes in health care delivery and in formation technology. Design: A four-step needs assessment process: fo cus groups developed lists of desirable skills; the research team orga nized candidate skills into a taxonomy; a survey of a random sample of librarians and library users assessed perception of importance of ind ividual skills; and the research team framed, as a unifying hypothesis , a training model. Survey methods: The survey was distributed to rand om samples of 150 librarians, stratified by type of library, and 150 l ibrary users, stratified by type of use. A non-randomized sample was o btained by mounting the survey on a World Wide Web server. The survey instrument included 96 distinct skills organized into 13 categories. R espondents rated the importance of each skill on a Likert scale and pr ovided a separate ranking by identifying the ten most important skills for the profession. Results: Among the participants, 51% of librarian s and 36% of library users responded to the survey. All categories of skills were rated above the midpoint of priority on the Likert scale. All groups rated personality characteristics and skills as most import ant, with an understanding of the health sciences, education, and rese arch being rated comparably to technical skills. Conclusions: Health s ciences librarians need a new educational model that provides them wit h broad-based tools to discover new roles and new resources for acquir ing individual skills as the need arises. A unifying training model wo uld involve trainees in developing their learning plan in a way that p romotes proactive inquiry and self-directed learning, and it would rot ate the trainees through projects to provide skills and an understandi ng of end-user work processes.