These guidelines were adapted from interviews with Candace Ford Gray and other staff at the Planetree Health Resource Center in San Jose, California, online at Planetree staff are known for their collection development skills and frequently serve as consultants to other health librarians.
Patients often ask oncology nurses for resources, including book recommendations. But how do you decide what to recommend? By word-of-mouth reviews from your patients, other nurses, or other health educators? You might be interested in the resources and criteria used by librarians to select titles.
In general, librarians--whether at public, consumer health, or hospital libraries--are seeing more need for patient education materials. In determining how best to fill these increasing demands, consumer-health librarians evaluate recommendations for health and medical books to order from several sources:
Library patrons
Core lists of selected titles from library organizations, which have been prepared by staff or members with expertise in that area
Reviews from professional journals--Booklist, Library Journal, and others such as Annals of Internal Medicine or NEJM that occasionally evaluate consumer books. They also look at reviews in professional publications, such as those of the consumer health chapter of the Medical Librarians' Association.
Library patrons like a range of titles and approaches--a mix of reading levels, depths, and alternative as well as conventional approaches. The same is probably true of your patients--people's preferences in resources vary.
Libraries order resources on the topics that people ask about most often. For instance, if people frequently ask about alternative therapies, librarians will buy a book to address that need. However, librarians want to make sure that patrons are reading the highest quality, most balanced, and most favorably evaluated book on a given topic.
Other criteria librarians use when considering a book:
Timeliness: How current is the information and how recently was the edition was published? This is more important in technical areas. Planetree Health Resource Center has some books from the early 1990s and even the 1980s on its shelves, but largely where nothing else on the topic is available.
Source: Is the publisher reputable--does it typically print soundly researched, well-written books that fulfill readers needs?
Author: Does the author have a background or credentials in the subject area? Librarians see an MD degree as adding certainty, but usually not good style or writing. Physician authors may also have a narrow point of view, for instance, not looking at the whole person or considering nationwide treatment standards.
Language: Is the book written in English or is it, instead, geared for non-English collections?
Place of publication: Some British books are of excellent quality, but spellings, names of conditions, etc., are different.
Organization: The following elements make a book more useful to the reader:
Index (very important)
Table of contents
List of organizations for people dealing with book's condition
Recommended books/bibliography
Footnotes, sources, or citations where appropriate
Format: Does the book make good use of subheads, running heads and footers, introductory paragraphs, and summaries?