Library Services to People with Special Needs Section - Glossary of Terms and Definitions

The need for this glossary first became strikingly evident during the development of the section's Guidelines for libraries serving hospital patients and the elderly and disabled in long-term care facilities.1 Within those guidelines, just the single descriptor, ‘hospital libraries,' was found to have dramatically different meanings in different parts of the world - in much of Western Europe, for example, ‘hospital libraries' almost always meant a library for patients, while in North America, it most often meant a library for health sciences staff. Those different meanings made communication and research in the field, especially research done through the literature, exceedingly difficult. They also had the potential to compromise findings.