District health libraries

Two letters in reaction to the article "Making a start with district health libraries" by Materia et al in World Health Forum, vol. 15, no. 1, 1994. In his letter, Lippman criticizes the limited selection of documents distributed in the pilot project described by Materia et al and the lack of collaboration with existing medical libraries in Tanzania and Uganda. Lippman briefly describes a Peace Corps project in Malawi where district health libraries were also set up. O'Sullivan and Lendita in their letter also stress that distributing a core collection is not sufficient and that other, especially local, information sources are equally important. They also stress the need to train library staff to actively use the information they collect. As an example of this approach they mention the Continuing Education Programme of the Ministry of Health, Tanzania, which is establishing six zonal continuing education resource centres country-wide.