Infant Hospital Library

Abstract


 The child, when hospitalized, loses the freedom to play, as he is accustomed to, for being confined in a hospital environment, subject to a medical treatment that can cause pain and fear. The adult who accompanies needs information about the disease and the treatment of the child. The infant hospital library attempts to meet the needs of both of its users. However, such a library has not been thoroughly considered for scientific inquiry. Hence, this paper investigates its structure and actions by addressing three subjects as follows. First, a software was developed specifically for this type of library, which registered the catalog, users and loans data of two years of service of a voluntary infant hospital library in a Brazilian state public hospital. Then, an exploratory study of the reading preferences of the users while hospitalized was carried out, whose findings follow. Adults play an important role in encouraging and assisting recreational reading, which occurred in all age groups of a child and similarly between genders. Furthermore, users preferred to read literature, religious and comic books in their native language that generally consist of short stories. Finally, collection development policies were determined based on the users’ reading preferences.