I Am Not a Specialist: Why We All Need to be Worrying About Medical Information1

The World Wide Web has dramatically altered the landscape of information seeking in health. The provision of medical information has historically been the business of medical librarians, and their principal clientele has been physicians, nurses, and allied health professionals, as well as students in those fields. Accordingly, for decades library schools have seen medical library science as an arcane specialty. The Web, however, has democratized access to health information. Searching for health topics online is now the most popular consumer activity after the use of email. In this paper, I discuss the changes in healthcare information use effected by the World Wide Web; give examples of the integration of medical librarianship into generalist courses in library and information science (LIS) degree programs; and finally discuss the challenges of integrating the medical specialization into generalist teaching. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]