Reviewed by Erika Kirsch (UBC Pharma) and the leadership of the MLA Health Associations Caucus.

Non-academic health sciences libraries can be broken into three broad categories: health care corporations, health care associations (e.g., research institutes and medical societies), and hospital-based libraries. The job duties and collection breadth vary between organizations and can be quite expansive. The structure of hospital libraries may be more complex and are discussed in additional detail below this section.

The following factors may impact collections in all three library settings:

• Staffing
  • Librarians may work solo, with staff support, or with colleagues who have other professional backgrounds.
  • Is the librarian employed part-time? Are they on site? Do they have a role that is secondary to other responsibilities in the company?
• Reporting and budget structure
  • Reporting structures vary and may include the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Chief Information Officer (CIO), or Information Technology (IT) as the direct supervisor.
  • How are information resources funded? Who approves the budget? Who licenses, orders, and pays for information resources?
• Mission of the library
  • Does the library serve or support the entire organization, or only specific chapters, units, divisions, departments?
  • Are there other sites, campuses, branches or offices that the library supports?
  • Does the library purchase or license specialized resources for individual departments?
    • There may be specialized resources to consider such as HIPAA-compliant research data repositories, pharmaceutical or chemical databases, business intelligence or marketing databases, bioinformatics, Big Data, patents, etc.
• Is there a consortia to help with purchasing and/or licensing?
• Is there a physical library?
  • How are print materials cataloged? Do you need to have an OPAC?
  • Does it include computer labs or other working spaces?
• Collection management considerations
  • Is the collection all online, only in print, or a mix?
  • How are the information resources made discoverable to those entitled to use them? For example, is there a library system, intranet, or proxy access?
  • Are the collections open to the public or for employees only?
  • How are the information resources promoted to the intended audience to ensure awareness of collection holdings?
• Other factors that may affect collection scope, decisions, and financing include whether:
  • The librarian is the chief copyright officer.
  • The library has company archival responsibilities.
  • The library or librarian is involved in the company’s research or other competitive intelligence development, publications, peer review, marketing, education, etc.

Communities for Association and Corporate Libraries

• Medical Library Association’s (MLA) Health Association and Corporate Libraries Caucus. You must be a member of MLA to join this caucus.
• Special Libraries Association’s (SLA) Pharmaceutical & Health Technology Division. You must be a member of SLA to post to the division’s email list, although their discussions are freely viewable online.
• American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy’s (AACP) Drug Information and Library Science section. You must be a member of AACP to join this section.

References and Further Reading: Association and Corporate Libraries

Some of the articles in this section provide background information on non-academic health libraries and may not reference collection development explicitly. They are being provided because they may help you scope your collection development practice through a more thorough understanding of the corporate library context and culture.

Hospitals

There are various types of hospitals that are differentiated by ownership models, funding sources, geographic location, trauma level, and whether they are teaching or non-teaching. More information can be found at Rasmussen University’s website “Types of Hospitals: Your Go-To Guide for Deciphering Differences.” Hospital librarians may have a number of additional responsibilities to traditional library work, such as being the director or administrator of continuing medical education, or serving as a member on quality improvement committees.

Some hospital-specific collections considerations include:

• The mission and role of the library in the hospital
  • Does the library provide information support to clinicians-physicians, nurses, other healthcare professionals, residents, researchers, patients, administrators,  families/consumer health, the community, or others?
• Affiliations
  • Academic programs
  • Hospital corporations and systems
  • Government networks, e.g., Veterans Health Administration Medical Centers aka Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals
  • Library consortia for purchasing, licensing, or education
    • For example, the Group Licensing Initiative from the Health Sciences Library Association of New Jersey (HSLANJ) negotiates licenses for 130+ hospital and medical institutions in the National Network of Libraries of Medicine’s Mid-Atlantic Region (NNLM MAR) and Southeastern/Atlantic Region (NNLM SE/A).
• A central licensing point for resources
• Additional services centralized under the library such as audiovisual support, archives, Continuing Medical Education (CME) registry, etc.

Hospital libraries may also need to have policies in place for the circulation of their items to protect patients from hospital-spread infections. It could include a hand hygiene plan, a wipe-down procedure, guidance on when it is appropriate to throw out items because they cannot be fully cleaned, whether books need to be circulated in plastic bags, etc. Librarians and a hospital infection control team should develop a plan together.

Communities for Hospital Libraries

• Medical Library Association’s (MLA) Hospital Library Caucus. You must be a member of MLA to join this caucus.

References and Further Reading: Hospital Libraries