Health Science Libraries: the challenge of the future

The global village has certainly arrived and as more and more people travel ever more widely there is both the opportunity to assist each other in the treatment of disease and disease itself is more easily transmitted round the globe. There is therefore a matching need for a global system of health information and as health information professionals it is our role to create the network. Technology offers new opportunities and new challenges, but we must be aware of the need for appropriate technologies and not simple high technology which might create two worlds of the information rich and the information poor. The other great challenge presented by technology is the direct delive,y of information to the end user. If this is to be effective, health information professionals must have an increasingly prominent role in training their present users in the skills of information management.
Although much work has been done there will also be an increasing need to meet the legitimate information needs of staff working in health sciences allied to medicine - laboratory, nursing and therapeutic staff - an often neglected group. At a crossroads one option is always to refuse the challenge of the way ahead and return back down the path, in our case to simple collections of books. The challenge facing librarians is to choose the more difficult paths which lead into a future of daunting technical complexity, but a future of great excitement.