Planetree staff are known for their collection development skills and frequently serve as consultants to other health librarians. Patients often ask oncology nurses for resources, including book recommendations. You might be interested in the resources and criteria used by librarians to select titles. They also look at reviews in professional publications, such as those of the consumer health chapter of the Medical Librarians' Association .
Libraries order resources on the topics that people ask about most often.
For instance, if people frequently ask about alternative therapies, librarians will buy a book to address that need. However, librarians want to make sure that patrons are reading the highest quality, most balanced, and most favorably evaluated book on a given topic. This is more important in technical areas. Planetree Health Resource Center has some books from the early 1990s and even the 1980s on its shelves, but largely where nothing else on the topic is available. Librarians see an MD degree as adding certainty, but usually not good style or writing.