What Do You Call a "Medical Library" in 2008? "Information Commons"

John D. Halamka of the blog Life as a Healthcare CIO shares some interesting ideas:

"In my CIO role at Beth Israel Deaconess, I oversee the medical libraries. In the past, Libraries were "clean, well lighted places for books". With the advent of Web 2.0 collaboration tools, blogging, content management portals, lulu.com on demand publishing, and digital journals, it is clear that libraries of paper books are becoming less relevant.

The end result is that the Medical Library has been renamed the Information Commons and the Department of Medical Libraries has been retitled the Department of Knowledge Services. Librarians are now called Information Specialists."

Way of the future.

Google is scanning books in such a fervor that you can see the fingers of the overworked human scanners in quite a lot of digital copies on Google Books. In the 21st century, paper is converted to digital medium via manual labor.


Hand Scanned in Google Book Search. Image source: Google Blogoscoped, a Creative Commons license.


My Interview With Google Discussing Google Book Search. The Efficient MD.

References:
Knowledge Navigators Combat Information Overload. Life as a Healthcare CIO.
Hand Scanned in Google Book Search. Google Blogoscoped.
Google Books Adds Hand Scans. Tech Crunch.

Related:
What Do You Call A Medical Library. The Krafty Librarian.
NPR: “Who Needs Libraries?” (aidio), 01/2008.

Updated: 02/28/2008