Most academic libraries produce free handouts for their students ‐ leaflets on particular aspects of literature searching can be found in little plastic display cases conveniently housed near most of our catalogue terminals and entrance lobbies. Some of us have got so far as to put copies of handouts free on our Web pages. The British Library, however, has decided to charge 30p per page for its handout.
With the increased emphasis on “evidence based health care” virtually all health care professionals need to learn how to get access to recorded information. It seems to me that they need guidance in three areas: using reference sources (both library‐based and Web‐based); using systems which give access to the journal literature; and, once they have exhausted the resources of their own library or information service, how to move on to make use of more specialised institutions. Patients have also become much more information‐conscious. Even the most computer‐illiterate psychotherapist is soon likely to be confronted with patients who have gained access to the National Electronic Library for Mental Health (not mentioned here, but see www.psychiatry.ox.ac.uk/ cebmh/nelmh for work in progress). All good practitioners should have free leaflets for their patients giving information on the disorders they treat, together with some suggestions for further reading or further useful sources of information. There are bits of all of these useful services in this pamphlet. As far as I can see, all the information in here is accurate and useful, but I find the publication as a whole to be unsatisfactory as well as over‐priced. From a user’s point of view it seems to me that it would be more useful if the different strands I mentioned above could be teased out into four separate leaflets, and from a provider’s point of view it would be more useful to have this text expanded into something bulkier. Most librarians will never have the need to use the Surgeon‐General’s Index‐Catalogue, for example, and will not need a whole page on it. Those who do need to guide readers through it and have not used it regularly themselves would benefit from much more detailed advice on how to make effective use of it.
I am tempted to suggest that the best use health librarians can make of this pamphlet is to borrow a copy through the inter‐library loan service, photocopy it, and then use bits of it as a basis for redesigning their own free handouts, but I suppose the British Library really needs the money.
