تنمية مجموعة مكتبة المستشفي السلطاني وفقا لحاجات المستفيدين : اعتماد أسلوب خدمة الإحاطة

Abstract AR

Hospitals, as they recognize the strategic value of the qualified and professional health knowledge, become aware of the need to actively manage their collection development process so that they will be able to transform their mission from being only a health care treatment facilities into learning organization.

Practically, the library takes the responsibility to build its collection based on searching and browsing the publishers’ catalogues and the users’ suggestions.

Nearly, as with other libraries, only few users are concerned with collection development process and feed the library with frequent suggestions and involved themselves as being members of the selection committee.

Simply, the reason is that each physician is occupied to see between 16-20 patients and has no time to read.

Hence, it is the aim of the current study to explore the alert service: - As a tool, how it can be applied to support the collection development process in comparison with traditional process, and - As a user-oriented service, how it can be trusted to motivate physicians’ health knowledge and to support the library selection policy and collection development.

To achieve these aims, a qualitative approach has been applied and data were collected through interviewing 12 physicians.

From the data analysis three major themes (health knowledge updating, alerting services, and selection criteria) and seven issues (information resources, reading motivations, profile specifications, time management, publication selection, websites, and publications) were extracted.

The results show an acceptable awareness of the alert services and online resources, but the problem lies on the lack of the Internet access and time availability for reading.

Thus, this study recommends Deparmtent of Information Studies, College of Arts and Social Sciences, Sultan Qaboos University.a user-based model for the health collection development.

This model relies on motivating physicians to be more effective when supported with the in-house (intranet) and world wide (internet) connection to the health knowledge.