Flaherty, Mary Grace (2018). Promoting individual and community health in the library. Chicago, IL: American Library Association

摘要

In this time of information access, literally in our pockets via our smartphones, understanding where and how to find good information about health can be confusing. While drug companies are required to mark their literature in magazines as being advertisements, websites such as WebMD, a for profit business, have no such restriction. The health consumer has no idea that when they are looking at such a website, they are viewing information that has been created by a business, which can provide information in a biased way. A key question is how can libraries support patrons in finding accurate and reliable health information? This question is especially important for public and academic libraries, who generally do not have a specialty in medical librarianship. Mary Grace Flaherty, in her new book Promoting Individual and Community Health in the Library, tackles the questions of health literacy outreach in libraries that are not specialized as medical or health libraries. Flaherty has a strong background in working in health libraries having got her start as a librarian in the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health. From there, she created the USQA Center for Health Care Research before switching over to being the director of the Sydney Public Library in New York and then finally shifting into a PhD program and becoming an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in the School of Library and Information Science. Since the beginning of her career, and through periods when she wasn't directly related to the health professions, Flaherty has clearly had a passion for health literacy and outreach. Her publications consistently focus on health literacy, community health, health outreach, and topics related to health information and special populations. Having been involved in health librarianship since the early 1990s, Flaherty is in a good position to discuss health information outreach for librarians who do not typically engage in it. Her book is a good primer on health information in terms of where to find it, how to evaluate it, and how to teach those health information assessment skills to others.