An Analytical study of the Medical College Libraries of Gujarat in the Age of Information Technology

The advent of Information and Communication Technologies and Impact of Information explosion have brought many changes in diverse field of knowledge, especially in medical sciences which had profound impact on medical professionals, practitioners, students in pursuing their research and patient care. The medical professionals require pinpointed, accurate and speedy information for updating their knowledge. Due to the elasticity of budgets and increases in journal and book prices every year, keeping in view of user needs, libraries are forced to join a consortium. Medical education aims at developing medical manpower suitable to the needs of the country. The medical manpower produced in the state of Gujarat is in thousands. It is no exaggeration to state that libraries are one of the primary sources of knowledge to this manpower. The medical college libraries have a crucial role to play directly in the promotion of medical education and health care information and indirectly in various health welfare programmes. Literature Survey Chatopadhyay and Ghatak (2008) revealed the infrastructure, services in dental college libraries in Kolkata they conclude that library professionals should acquire IT related skills, academic and professional qualities for providing good quality library services to user. Womboth and Abba (2008) found that The Federal University of Technology, Yola library has embraced ICT in its services. Catalogue cards are now produced by computer. FUTYLIS, locally developed software, is being used to prepare the library\u27s OPAC. This is to be replaced by the more comprehensive ALICE FOR WINDOWS Software in order to completely offer online services. Out of the eight academic librarians, six are computer/Internet-literate. The library has seven computer operators. Howse, Bracke, and Keim (2006) describe Arizona Health Sciences Library has collaborated with clinical faculty to develop a federated search engine that is useful for meeting real-time clinical information needs, they described the collaborative model used for developing technology-mediated services for targeted users. Wang, Gui-Zhi, et al. (2006) they described that, Medical Libraries should take the responsibility to provide medical information service for public health emergencies in the areas where they are located. Medical libraries can improve their selective information dissemination service for policy-makers, scientific worker, healthcare professionals, and the public by making use of the on-line update holdings with modern information technology. V. S. Cholin (2005) stated that IT has revolutionized the information handling activities in research and academic libraries in India.. The university libraries in India are at various stages of development in the application of information technology tools in their day-to-day activities described that libraries provides effective access to resources available within universities and elsewhere. Halkar and Gupta (2005) they observed that user is the supreme leader of any kind of information system. The benefits of information revolution are centering on the user and their convenience. The third and fourth laws of library science viz. lay emphasis on the importance of the user\u27s research and his or her time. Rathinasabapathy G. (2005) observed that the Internet gives access to a huge collection of health information to patients and professionals. Further, the training required for Librarians and Medical Professionals for evaluation of online healthcare information resources