Medical Librarianship in Nigeria--a review of the literature and comments on some problems and prospects.

The literature of medical librarianship of Nigeria is reviewed. The staff structure of Nigerian univeristy libraries and, in particular, of the medical libraries attached to them is restrictive, unprogressive, and unconducive to the development of medical librarianship in Nigeria. These medical libraries should cease to be administered and regarded as just unavoidable appendages of the main university libraries. They should be independent, full-fledged libraries of their own, recognixed as full academic departments of their respective colleges or faculties, with their heads being in no way inferior in status to other heads of academic departments.The granting of faculty status to Nigerian unviersity librarians should go the whole way and let the principle of multiple professorships be applied to the staff structure of unviersity libraries. Efforts are being made to effect bibliographic organization of Nigerian medical literature. A national library of medicine for Nigeria, however, humble its beginning, should be established.     

A description of the catalog division project at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia Library.

This paper describes the procedures used at the Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia to divide its ninety-year-old dictionary card catalog. The division was necessitated by overcrowding, obsolete subject headings, and lack of a complete authority list which resulted in like materials being scattered throughout the catalog under several headings. Two catalogs were created: the historical-biographical catalog, representing all works published before 1950 and all works of historical or biographical nature; and the current catalog, containing all works published from 1950 on, excepting historical or biographical materials. The 1950- catalog was further divided into name and subject catalogs, and the subject section was revised according to MeSH. The project was completed in about two years. As a result, searching time has been much reduced, and the library is able to take advantage of the annual revisions of MeSH to update the subject catalog.     

Communicating Prevention: The Effects of the keepin' it REAL Classroom Videotapes and Televised PSAs on Middle-School Students' Substance Use

This study sought to determine if exposure to two communication-oriented activities, videotapes and public service announcements, accounts for changes in substance use among adolescents participating in the Drug Resistance Strategies Project's keepin' it REAL adolescent substance use prevention curriculum. Middle-school students (4,734, 72% Latino) responded to questionnaires related to these analyses. An analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) model was fit separately to six substance use outcomes. The results suggested that intervention students who saw four or five videos engaged in less substance use in the past month than did students who saw fewer videos. Having seen the PSAs one or more times did not predict the reported change in substance use.     

Bakhtin Applied: Employing Dialogism to Analyze the Interplay of the Ideologies of Individualism and Community Within the Discourse of Alcoholics Anonymous

An ongoing debate regarding the nature of therapeutic communities concerns the extent to which these communities reinforce the ideologies of individualism and community. This article engages this discussion through a process of social text analysis informed by the dialogism theory of Russian philosopher and literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin. Dialogism seeks to understand the multiple voices interpenetrating particular utterances, revealing an emergent social construction of meaning. Applying this approach to examples of discourse from a prominent therapeutic community, Alcoholics Anonymous, illustrates how meaning in the discourse of this movement can be understood to emerge among the interplay between the ideologies of individualism and community as expressed within the movement's narrative practice.     

Program Evaluation in Libraries: Relating Operations and Clients

Evaluators of library programs have different perspectives on why to conduct an evaluation and also how to do so. The author suggests that a minimal approach to conducting a library program evaluation is to prove that the program exists. But this perspective has expanded to include different degrees of interest in the client and operations, culminating in a combined focus that leads evaluators to conduct outcome assessments. The chapter includes speculation on what motivates managers to undertake an evaluation, a review of some ways that library evaluations are conducted, and a discussion of several examples of program evaluations. Though there are not single directives for undertaking a library program evaluation, there are a variety of tools and advice to entice librarians to do more of them as a way to improve understanding the value of a library to its clientele and in society.