Current State of User Education in Regular Classes by Medical School Librarians

The use of electronic information has been increasing in medical science. Medical students need to know how to get the information that they want. Medical librarians are specialists on medical information and must be able to help medical students find what they need. Consequently, medical school librarians should provide user education opportunities, including topics on information literacy in regular classes. Questionnaires were mailed to 80 medical school libraries. 72 libraries (90%) responded. In 45 of these libraries (62%), librarians are presently teaching user education in regular classes and in 8 of them (11%), librarians were teaching before. The major reason why the librarians had started to teach such classes was because of requests from teachers. In 17 of 53 libraries (32%), the librarians felt that teaching regular classes was very hard work because it takes much time to prepare for teaching. Most librarians are teaching medical literature retrieval. The results of the survey seem to show that most medical librarians wrestle with teaching user education in regular classes. Whether librarians continue to teach such topics in regular classes depends on the opinions of teachers and it is an important issue in future.