Letter in response to Mitchell <i>et al</i>. ‘Collective amnesia: reversing the global epidemic of addiction library closures’

I read this editorial 1 with great interest. I would like to thank the authors for bringing this issue to the addiction community's attention. As a Vice-President of Education in a large centre for addiction and mental health research, education, and treatment in Toronto, I would also like to express my concern regarding the recent trend to shrink library services in academic health science centres. As part of an education strategic planning process, I have engaged our librarians to be the lynchpins of life-long learning and knowledge transfer for our organization. Using this conceptual framework, librarians can be thought of as learning coaches. This includes a key role in training and professional development in information management for everyone who works in an academic health science centre. In order to be able to retrieve information, we all need training in the art of asking good questions by using models such as PICO 2. Librarians need to work closely with their information systems' leaders to develop the organization's specific models of access to information from multiple sources, decision support systems for clinicians, and personalized web pages for everyone working in an organization where evidence-based information can be pulled and where information is published on a regular basis. Hospitals are increasingly providing feedback to clinicians on their performance regarding their standard of patient care, and librarians are needed to help direct clinicians to sources of information that can help correct or improve their performance. In this way, librarians can also be conceptualized as knowledge brokers using a knowledge transfer framework. To optimize their role and function, libraries also need to be reconfigured to support work-based learning, including access to ‘just-in-time’ information that is distributed throughout the organization; in this case the library is as close as your desktop, laptop or your mobile device. It is crucial that library services adapt to the rapid changes that have recently democratized information retrieval, which make it much easier for anyone to do a literature search. However, this does not make everyone an information retrieval expert or a librarian. Working in the addictions field is complex; the approaches for clinical care, education and research are often multi-disciplinary and multi-systemic. Such levels of complexity require specialized support and services that are also complex and specialized, and available in-house and ‘just-in-time’. Libraries that can adapt their functioning to the needs of individuals working there, can play a key role in academic health science centres. Libraries should also maintain their long-established unique role as places for reflection and study for students, clinicians and scientists. Unlike libraries of old where silence was golden, the addictions library of the future might combine spaces of reflection and study with spaces for engagement of individuals and groups, idea and community-building, and knowledge exchange and discovery. Instead of running away from library services in addiction treatment and research facilities, my recommendation would be to run towards them. None.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.