The Online Presence of Information Services on the Public Web Sites of the Top Children’s Hospitals in America

Abstract

This study investigates the online presence of information services on the public Web sites of the top-ranked children’s hospitals in the United States of America as designated annually by U.S. News & World Report. Terms commonly used to describe information services were entered individually in the site’s search engine to locate relevant Web pages. Conventional terms for information services, such as library, libraries, librarian, and librarians, were generally successful in retrieving Web pages about the hospital library within the first 10 search results. The search term resource center was successful in retrieving the Web pages of consumer health collections. The Web pages of unconventional collections, such as video libraries and genomic libraries, were also retrieved. The public Web sites of all five top-ranked children’s hospitals have Web pages for their consumer health collections, but only three of five provide Web pages for their medical libraries.

KEYWORDS:

• children’s hospitals
• consumer health collections
• hospital libraries
• information services
• medical librarians
• pediatrics