No abstract

Health sciences educators are increasingly incorporating multimedia (including images, animations, and videos) into educational materials such as PowerPoint lectures, Web sites, and interactive quizzes and cases. Educators continue to "reinvent the wheel" and develop costly duplicates of multimedia resources, despite new opportunities offered by the Internet to share resources. The Health Education Assets Library (HEAL) is designed to provide health sciences educators with freely available, high quality multimedia materials to augment health sciences education. We describe an XML schema that we created to index the health sciences multimedia resources in HEAL. The metadata schema provides a common mechanism by which remotely located distributed systems may share metadata records, allowing the end user to search many collections through one interface.

This panel will focus on the needs and behaviors of patients and consumers of health information. The discussion will cover services and systems required and how specific research and projects on digital libraries are addressing those needs.Digital Library Projects at the Health Sciences Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Brian Hilligoss) NC Health Info (http://w.nchealthinfo.org), involves a collection of websites of health care services, programs and providers across the state of North Carolina that is closely linked to MEDLINEplus, the consumer health information website created by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health. NC Health Info, which has been in existence just under a year now, has been funded by the NLM, in part to serve as a model for other states wishing to link their local health information with that provided by MEDLMEplus. The linking of NC Health Info and MEDLINEplus enables users to move seamlessly back and forth between the valuable information on disease and wellness topics provided by MEDLINEplus and the numerous programs and providers that address those topics in users' own communities, provided by NC Health Info. Issues to be discussed in this presentation:-Improving access to digital libraries: metadata, indexing, taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies. NC Health Info utilizes two vocabularies, one of which was developed by staff and a detailed cataloging process to enable users to find health care services and related health information.-Strategies and models for interoperability: NC Health Info involves over 40,000 dynamically created pages which link with over 600 health topics on MEDLINEplus. As both sites and vocabularies are constantly changing, staff has developed a weekly process involving a mix of XML and human brainpower to keep the two sites in sync and provide users access to appropriate resources -Results of two usability studies on the site Medical DLs (Javed Mostafa)The presenter will discuss the need for medical DLs for non-experts and consumers of health care; the talk will concentrate on key services a medical DL should support and will use MedSIFTER as an example to demonstrate some of these services. Hawaii Independent Physicians Association (Hawaii IPA) is an association of about 700 physicians in Hawaii. They have a website to serve the physicians and the panelists will present their experience while creating an additional website to serve the needs of Hawaii's IPA Patient Centric Design of a Digital Library