Health care machine-readable data files: secondary analysis, access, and the role of the library

Access to health care machine-readable data files (MRDF) is becoming increasingly important to students and researchers in the health care field who use the data in secondary analysis. Health sciences libraries must play a role in providing such access, and this role should consist primarily in providing users with information about the identity and contents of available MRDF and about how they may be obtained. Libraries should therefore collect extensive materials containing information about the MRDF that may be of interest to their users. Many such materials are available in print, and their quality may be expected to improve as newly developed methods and procedures for constructing bibliographic citations, abstracts, and catalog entries for MRDF are put into practice. Also, it is now feasible to incorporate data file abstracts into existing online bibliographic databases.