Pathways to Nursing: A Guide to Library and Online Research in Nursing and Allied Health

Citation

Maris Pendleton, S. (2005), "Pathways to Nursing: A Guide to Library and Online Research in Nursing and Allied Health", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 39 No. 4, pp. 385-386. https://doi.org/10.1108/00330330510628015

This book includes much of value to nurses and allied health professionals who wish to retrieve information from libraries and the Internet. Its primary aim is to enable readers to learn more about a subject independently, without assistance from educators. To this end the authors attempt to offer some basic resources and techniques that can be used by student nurses and qualified health professionals, such as nurse practitioners, healthcare researchers and supervisors. Although the intended readership is fairly wide, the focus on basic skills would seem to make this book most relevant to student nurses.

The book has a clear framework, addressing six major components that are essential to the development of information and utilisation skills in nursing and health sciences. Chapter 1 covers the overall layout of a library, the way the resources are organised and the roles of the library staff. This chapter includes standard information on circulation, reservations and the reference department. It also makes some useful suggestions regarding proper expectations of the reference librarian's role (“there to help you do your work, not to do it for you”) and the importance of a considerate approach, e.g. keeping queries brief and simple when it is obvious the reference librarian is very busy coping with queues and phone calls.

Chapter 2 focuses on the library catalogue. It covers card catalogues, classification systems and the online catalogue. Several illustrative figures are included to complement the text. In Chapter 3 the reference collection is discussed and important issues such as the significance of the copyright date are included. Some of the examples chosen by the authors could usefully have been related to the field of nursing and healthcare, rather then to unrelated fields such as “the current membership of Pentecostal churches in Latin America”.

Chapter 4 covers periodicals and indexes and is well illustrated with examples. There is no mention of the British Nursing Index, an important resource for nurses in the UK. In Chapter 5, electronic resources and the Internet are explored and there is a very helpful list of points to encourage a critical approach to Internet sources. It would have been useful to mention image banks as a resource for ward teaching.

Chapter 6 focuses on putting together a research paper whilst the final chapter provides a concise overview of the process of gathering and managing information.

At the end of the book are lists of various resources and almost inevitably, in a book of this length published in the US, there are a number of important omissions relevant to UK readers, e.g. there is no mention of the web sites for the Department of Health, the Health Protection Agency, the Royal College of Nursing or the Nursing and Midwifery Council. Further afield the World Health Organisation web site is not included, and neither is that of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta. In the “Other references” section some of the names of authors appear to have been inadvertently omitted and in the “Resources” section as a whole there is some inconsistency in the referencing style.

The book has good‐sized print, bold headings and a useful index. It is written in a friendly, informative style. However, it is possible that some readers from the predominantly female profession of nursing may be irritated by the authors' decision to use mostly male pronouns as “gender generic” rather than including a more equal mix of male and female pronouns.

This book achieves its aim of providing instruction in the basic skills of information retrieval and utilisation and for the UK reader it could be a useful resource to be used alongside other books in this area published in the UK.