Gemma Madle

Information for the public about disease: usability issues in the development of the National Electronic Library for Communicable Diseases

The Institute of Health Sciences at City University has been funded by the Department of Health to construct a National Electronic Library for Communicable Disease to form part of the National Electronic Library for Health. As a final preparation for its launch, the developers have been conducting a number of experiments to test public understanding of the information housed and if the site is easily accessible and usable. This paper reports on the results of the usability tests, carried out in the Science Museum in February 2003. Data gathering was by questionnaire, observation and interview. Findings suggested a great appreciation of the site by members of the general public.

Evaluating the Changes in Knowledge and Attitudes of Digital Library Users

Medical digital libraries are essentially life-critical applications providing timely access for professionals and the public to current medical knowledge and practice. This paper presents a new methodology for evaluating the impact of the knowledge within a medical digital library on users by testing their knowledge improvements and attitude changes. Using pre and post-use questionnaires we tested the impact of a small medical information website acting as an interface to the National electronic Library for Communicable Disease. The changes in user attitudes and the correlation with knowledge improvements observed indicate the potential for this methodology to be applied as a general evaluation technique of digital libraries and the impact of online information on user learning.

Agent-Based Up-to-date Data Management in National electronic Library for Communicable Disease

Modern healthcare specialists are overwhelmed with medical information available on the Internet. However, it is difficult to find a particular piece of information when and where they actually need it. The National electronic Library for Health (NeLH) is addressing this issue by providing a single-entry portal to evidence-based medical information on the Internet enhanced with a quality tag assigned by professional experts in the field. In order to fully utilize the potential of an Internet-based library, the NeLH is distributed and consists of a number of Virtual Branch Libraries (VBLs), each dedicated to a particular disease or a medical area. Our team is responsible for the development of the communicable disease branch of the NeLH, calledNeLCD (National electronic Library for Communicable Disease). VBLs are dynamically updated and their design reflects the needs of each particular user base. However, users accessing a single VBL may want to search the entire NeLH or should have the option of being able to search the entire NeLH. Therefore, support for a distributed search according to an adopted topology ofVBL servers is essential. Intelligent interface agents are essential for the development and runtime of the library as they perform autonomously a number of tasks related to the search, assist humans in information publishing, the document review process and data exchange and retrieval. In this paper, we present an agent-based solution to assist in distributed search across the NeLH, and customization and personalization in the NeLCD

User-Centered Evaluation Model for Medical Digital Libraries

It remains unclear whether the recent explosion of medical Internet Digital Libraries (DLs), enabled by substantial investments into eHealth by national governments and international agencies, has brought the desired improvements. As ultimately life-critical applications, medical DLs play a crucial role in delivering evidence to professionals and empowering patients. However, little attention has been given to impact evaluation with domain experts in real settings to assess whether they actually make a difference to clinical practice. In this paper we describe a novel evaluation framework --- Impact-ED --- developed at CeRC to fill the gap in impact evaluation research taking into account the community, content, services and technology dimensions of DLs. We present an account of Impact-EDs application in assessing the impact of the National Resource for Infection Control in the UK (NRIC www.nric.org.uk) --- a real-world medical DL used by over 40 000 professionals monthly.

Impact-ED - A New Model of Digital Library Impact Evaluation

This paper presents Impact-ED, a new model for digital library impact evaluation. The model draws on assumptions from the Theory of Planned Behaviour and the Sense-Making Model. The paper discusses the current shortfalls of digital library impact evaluation and presents an alternative. Knowledge and attitude are put forward as potential measures of impact and different methods are triangulated and data linked to provide a comprehensive picture of the impact of the library at the time of use. The model shows how the digital library is being used to benefit users in their work, how it is changing their knowledge and attitudes and how the information found is used in real-time in the real world. It is being tested in the healthcare domain on the National Resource for Infection Control (www.nric.org.uk) but is expected to be transferable to other domains as further work will prove.

Mining for Patterns of Semantic Link Usage: Do Domain Users Actually Like Semantic Browsing?

A perceived limitation of the current Web is that it is comprised of static links with no connection to any underlying domain knowledge. The Semantic Web is seen as a potential solution to this problem by delivering semantically related information to users dynamically. However, the benefit to users is rarely questioned and there have been few real-world user evaluations of semantic systems. In this paper we present a user-centred evaluation of three Semantic Web Browsers (SWB) that have been extended as part of the Sealife project. The results presented are based on analysis of the server logs from each application in relation to time taken to perform pre-defined tasks along with the amount of semantic activity carried out. It was found that the user experience was dependent on the SWB used but there was some indication users will be able to find information more quickly and that users will explore semantic features if present.