Sustainable Development Goal 3 calls on United Nations Member States to ‘ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing for all, at all ages’. IFLA’s new briefing underlines how libraries promote health, both through support to researchers and practitioners, and by helping users directly.

With the recognition that the best way to tackle disease is to prevent it happening in the first place, there is a new focus on the role of ‘health promotion’ and information in successful health policies (not least SDG3). 

Libraries can play a major role in this, given their expertise in managing and giving access to research, and as a trusted and welcoming community centre. 

Using papers presented at the World Library and Information Congress, this article highlights a number of examples of this happening in practice.

Read the article. See also the health chapter from the 2017 Development and Access to Information Report.