摘要：The growing importance of the role of the individual in making informed health decisions has spurred efforts to improve health literacy, especially in vulnerable populations characterized by disparities in health status and access to care. As part of this effort, libraries have engaged in outreach activities targeted at specific populations, institutions, and community groups, often involving multidisciplinary partnerships [1–4]. These services are aimed at improving both health literacy and health information literacy. The latter is defined by the Medical Library Association as ‘‘the set of abilities needed to recognize a health information need, identify likely information sources and use them to retrieve relevant information, assess the quality of the information and its applicability to a specific situation, and analyze, understand, and use the information to make good health decisions’’ [5]. Health information seeking is generally regarded as a component of health literacy [6].o
