The Medical Library Association Consumer Health Reference Service Handbook.

Librarians are confronting new challenges in providing consumer health information because of dramatic changes in the health care field, widespread use of Internet, and wide variation in the quality of Web resources. The Barclay-Halsted book is designed to meet those challenges and serve as a primer for librarians and others who help the general public locate consumer health information.

The book is divided into three sections, with the first part, titled “Consumer Health Essentials for Librarians,” addressing fundamentals of health care information. The section includes a chapter on basic terminology, a chapter with brief descriptions of the major health conditions of concern to the public, and a chapter exploring complementary and alternative medicine. This section is particularly useful to librarians with limited background in present day health care issues.

Part two has three chapters devoted to “Consumer Health Resources for Librarians.” The chapter on Websites discusses the criteria for selecting notable sites. The individual listings have a standardized format that includes privacy policy, advertisements, special features, and date of evaluation. Links to the selected sites are included on the CD-ROM accompanying the text. The chapter on recommended health print sources offers considerations for selecting books for collections and then provides major health conditions and annotations for the selected titles. A separate chapter contains resources for and about children that includes print and electronic formats. These resource lists in no way match the comprehensive coverage of Alan Rees's Consumer Health Information Source Book [1] or Cecilia Durkin's Consumer Health: A Guide to Internet Information Resources [2] but are starting points for small and medium-sized consumer health collections.

Part three focuses on “Consumer Health Services for Libraries.” Chapter seven in this part addresses various aspects of library service for health consumers, including collaboration between public and medical libraries, reference interviews, malpractice, and marketing. Considering the importance and difficulties of health-related reference interviews, this section is less informative than expected. Chapter eight discusses evaluating resources for users and identifies resources with information about practitioners and health care institutions.

A chapter is devoted to creating print consumer health publications, and another is devoted to building a consumer health Website. The CD-ROM includes templates for a model Website. These last two chapters contain unique information of value for consumer health services beyond the usual inhouse services.

This book fills the criteria of a handbook for public librarians and is highly recommended for that purpose. For the health sciences librarian, the last two chapters have valuable details for enhancing consumer health services.