The Eight Principles of Medical Librarians in the Health Systems

The access to health information for all people is the fundamental goal of the World Health Organization (WHO). It comes true when both health professionals and patients as beneficiaries have access to health information. Medical librarians play an important role in facilitating access to health information, and this role should be in the context and framework of scientific principles. The principles were first proposed by Thompson and Ranganathan and it was revised over time by scholars like Das (1), Gopinath, Holt, Gorman and Fadaie (2). The common feature of all these revisions is limited to activities of librarians to the library. But today, the activity scope of medical librarians is not only libraries but also they play a role in the scientometric centers, knowledge base centers, journals, publishing centers, and research centers (3) which are called Health Information Centers (HIC). In this article, we aimed to review and revise these principles according to new realm of medical librarians.