Background
The genesis of the CHLA/ABSC can be traced to the Annual Meeting of the Medical Library Association which was held in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1975. The Canadian Group of the MLA met there (it was its second meeting, having been founded the year before) on June 2 and established an “Ad hoc committee to study the organisational status of Canadian health librarians.”
The formation of this Ad-hoc committee arose at this meeting (it was not specifically on the pre-circulated agenda), as it was clear that the proliferation of Canadian health library groups was not in the best interests of Canadian health sciences librarians. It was important then, as now, that Canadian health librarians spoke with one authoritative voice but there were at the time three “national” groups (four if one counted the French speaking Section de la santé of ASTED).
These other groups were the Special Resource Committee on the Medical School Libraries of the Association of Canadian Medical Colleges. This grouped then, as now, the Directors of Canadian medical schools under the aegis of the ACMC. The ACMC group had been officially formed in 1967 and first met in 1968 but was actually the successor to the Canadian Library Association’s Committee on Medical Science Libraries that had been founded in 1961.
The second group which was active in 1975 was the Health Sciences Section of CASLIS (the Canadian Association of Special Libraries and Information Services) – itself a sub-group of the Canadian Library Association. This was a spin-off of and partial successor to the Committee on Medical School Libraries noted above. The third group was the Canadian Group of the Medical Library Association. This group had been formed in 1974 as a way to formalise the links between Canadian members of the MLA and the MLA.administration.
At the meeting of the Canadian Group in 1975 it was proposed that an ad-hoc committee be established to look at the situation and propose improvements. The Canadian Group of MLA chaired by Dick Fredericksen, then the Health Sciences Librarian at Memorial University of Newfoundland, voted overwhelmingly to establish a committee with a rather broad mandate: “To survey local health science library groups across the country; to discover the gaps existing; to locate key personnel.”
David S. Crawford from McGill University was appointed to chair this group and authorized to select its membership.
Read more about this topic: Canadian Health Libraries Association
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