Mark Funk commented on my recent post pleading for hospital IT departments to rethink some of their blocking policies. Blocking policies tend to affect hospital librarians more than academic medical librarians. Honestly I don't understand it. Don't academic medical centers deal with the same type of patient information and other security issues that hospitals do? I would argue that an academic institution may have to deal with more security issues than a hospital because they tend to have more people on their network and have more possible entry points for hackers. Is it more of bandwidth problem then a security problem? If so then why am I sporadically blocked from AltaVista's Bablefish and other libraries are blocked from Blogger? Do they fear viruses? I was told by somebody the reason our hospital used to block Yahoo Mail, Gmail, etc. was because of viruses.

Not every hospital library is the same. Some hospital librarians experience little or no Internet blocking problems. Perhaps we can learn from them. Mark's idea is to share information from the IT side of things. Try and understand what their rationale is for allowing certain technologies even though other hospital IT departments prohibit them. He states, "If you are a hospital librarian with little or no Internet blockage problems, talk with your IT people. See if they might be willing to write a few paragraphs explaining their choices, and how the hospital is still standing nonetheless." That information can be posted and shared and others can learn from it.

What I would think would be really nice is to eventually have an open dialog between librarian(s) and hospital IT personnel. Where representatives from both areas would be able to work together sharing concerns while trying to address the rapid changing environment of information and balancing the needs of the hospital. Ok that may be a little lofty. Some librarians consider themselves lucky they were notified in advance (2 days) that their institution's IP addresses will change (and be shared among other institutions). But it's Friday and I am allowed to day dream just a little...even if it is of an IT/librarian utopia.