Quantitative aspects of the management of health information.

Abstract

We report on quantitative techniques for managing health information as well as for the marketing and the management of health libraries and other health information centres. Important for marketing and management of libraries are the p.r. (public relations) and p.a. (public awareness) activities. We discuss reports (e.g. case studies, annual reports, ...) as important tools in this and pay special attention to the case of health information centres. We go into quantitative (mainly statistical) techniques in order to gather and manage data that form the basis of such reports : data context and definition, data collection, examples and its use as complete or incomplete sets : descriptive methods (such as graphs, regression, measures of central tendency and dispersion, etc ...), sampling, confidence intervals and hypothesis testing. We stress the fact that any librarian can become conversant with such analysis techniques and we underline the importance of such activities, both in libraries and in the population of its users. We give an account on some biomedical exercises that were carried out in LUC and in a Flemish interlibrary context. Finally, also the health literature itself can be the topic of quantitative investigations. We describe aspects of citation analysis with applications in the areas of the evaluation of medical research and aspects of bibliometric analysis, such as (e.g.) ageing, growth and collaboration.