Utilizing a novel search method that included the diversity of information resources public health practitioners use, has produced a richer and more useful picture of the information needs of the public health workforce than other literature reviews. There is a critical need for public health digital knowledge management systems designed to reflect the diversity of public health activities, to enable human communications, and to provide multiple access points to critical information resources. Public health librarians and other information specialists can serve a significant role in helping public health professionals meet their information needs through the development of evidence-based decision support systems, human-mediated expert searching and training in the use information retrieval systems.

Background: With the rapid expansion of scientific research, the ability to effectively find or integrate new domain knowledge in the sciences is proving increasingly difficult. Efforts to improve and speed up scientific discovery are being explored on a number of fronts. However, much of this work is based on traditional search and retrieval approaches and the bibliographic citation presentation format remains unchanged.

An unfortunate consequence of specialization in the sciences is poor communication across domains—which can hamper the knowledge discovery process. Research findings in one area may be pertinent to another, researchers may be unaware of relevant work by others that could be integrated into theirs, and important findings just outside a researcher's focus may go undiscovered. Compounding this problem is the information overload issue‐the difficulty of keeping current with information that continues to grow at an exponential rate. The development of methods and tools for assisting researchers and other professionals in an effective extraction of problem‐oriented knowledge from heterogeneous and massive information sources, and for using this knowledge in problem‐solving is one of the most fundamental research directions for the information and computer sciences today. It is clear that there is a need for new tools to support more precise identification of relevant research articles and, further, to provide visual clues regarding relationships among the document sets. We present here a suite of such tools which has been in development at the University of Washington for several years.

This paper describes the design of a syndromic surveillance system implemented for community-based monitoring of influenza-like illness. The system began as collaboration between colleagues from state and large metropolitan area health jurisdictions, academic institutions, and the non-profit, International Society for Disease Surveillance. Over the six influenza seasons from 2006 to 2012, the system was automated and enhanced, with new features and infrastructure, and the resulting, reliable, enterprise grade system supported peer comparisons between 44 state and local public health jurisdictions who voluntarily contributed summarized data on influenza-like illness and gastrointestinal syndromes. The system was unusual in that it addressed the needs of a widely distributed, voluntary, community engaged in real-time data integration to support operational public health.