The practice library.

DESPITE the exciting developments in electronic communication most doctors still learn by reading; the convenience of the printed text and the flexibility it allows in deciding where and when it can be used means that, at least for the next few years, books and journals will remain the principal source of information for practising clinicians. The literature of general practice is relatively new. There are still general practitioners in post who qualified when general practice had virtually no literature of its own and who grew up in a world where all the books and journals about their work came from outside general practice. The new generation, however, including all those who have been vocationally trained, has learnt its craft at a time when much about general practice has been written down. There is now a torrent of books on the subject, most of which have been written by general practitioners themselves. In the 1960s, following the stimulus of the postgraduate medical centre movement, it was generally considered that the natural place to have the books for the district was in the district medical library. Nowadays, however, it is considered much more important to have books and journals, as far as possible, in the setting where they will be most used and as close as possible to where patients are actually seen. Hospitals have a long tradition of departmental libraries and the practice library can be seen as the general practice equivalent. The practice library is a powerful indication of the practice's involvement with the literature of general practice,' and a practice which does not have a reasonable general practice section is making an important statement to its visitors about the relatively low priority its partners give to the development of their discipline. For there is no general practitioner today who can possibly claim to know it all. The whole basis of practice is constantly changing and all of us are increasingly dependent on colleagues for information and new ideas. The general practice section of the library needs to reflect this change and adapt to new ideas if it is to provide all the partners in a practice with a readily accessible source of intellectual stimulation. In training practices this has been a special requirement since the earliest days when the Joint Committee's Criteria for the selection of trainers in general practice2 laid down that the trainer should be 'familiar with …