الملخص الإنجليزي
This study aims at identifying how far the health libraries in the Sultanate of Oman are ready to participate in a national health cooperative information network that will help in dealing with all of the technical, managerial and human resources issues. The study also sheds the light on the current cooperation activities among health libraries, their equipments and requirements. Moreover, it discusses the basic needs required for the establishing of a cooperative network as well as the identifying of the possible obstacles that might face the aforementioned project.
The descriptive method was applied to achieve the study's goals and a questionnaire was developed and distributed to 32 medical libraries in the Sultanate of Oman. The most important results of the study are: Despite the limited cooperative activities among the investigated libraries and the absent of a well-defined policy, the results emphasized the willingness of these libraries to be involved in a national consortia project to achieve better health services and to ensure health knowledge integrity among the involved libraries. Regarding their readiness to cooperate with each other in such a project, the study confirms that there is no significant differences between the types of health libraries (college, hospital, or institute libraries) and their readiness to share services and resources in cooperative network. Most of health libraries lack the proper technical, human and communication requirements and needs to establish a library network. The existence of some administrative and organizing related obstacles that hinder the establishing of the project. The absence of any clear and well-defined policy or a strategy in most of these libraries due to the deficiency of specialized staff. It appears that the percentage of non professional staff in these libraries is approaching 91%. The limited awareness among the staff of these libraries of the importance of any consortia, cooperation, or unity between their libraries. Based on the above results, the study recommended: To improve their services, health libraries' coordinators should recognize the importance of the national coordination among each others, work hard to develop their libraries infrastructure, apply professional collection development strategy to include more e-resources and databases. Finally, the study proposed that it was time for the better equipped health libraries to initiate a cooperative project leading to the establishing of a cooperative network. A similar study to investigate more aspects of the topic like the groups improvement and their distribution methods is also suggested due to the recurrent need for information and data in the health field.
