Improving Access To Information Research Articles

Monitoring the status of a research community through a Knowledge Map

The NoE (Network of Excellence) INTEROP is an instrument for strengthening the excellence of European research in interoperability of enterprise applications, by bringing together the complementary competences required to develop interoperability in a more global and innovative way. One of the main objectives of INTEROP was to build a so-called “Knowledge Map” (KMap) of partner competences, a competency management system used to perform a periodic diagnostic of the extent of the research collaboration and coordination among the NoE members. The aim was to monitor the status of research in the field of interoperability through a web-based platform that allows the user to retrieve information according to his/her actual need in a specific situation. In the KMap, the information is semantically indexed and retrieved through a domain ontology, which was semi-automatically created using a novel methodology, based on interleaved machine learning and collaborative validation phases. This paper describes the architecture of the KMap and provides a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the advantages of a semantically indexed knowledge base as a means to improve information accessibility and network analysis.

Library consortia and digital services

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to focus on the new digital services to improve information access and, in particular, on the findings of a user satisfaction survey, at the University of Calabria, with the digital collection service (Emeroteca Virtuale) provided by CIBER[1], a national consortium of university libraries.Design/methodology/approachAfter a literature review, a questionnaire was carefully prepared and submitted to a sample of 1,350 patrons, 20 of whom were also interviewed. Quotes from users are reported, showing feelings and observations. Additionally, a usability test was performed in order to assess the usability and usefulness of Emeroteca Virtuale. Frequency of use, as well as reasons for use and non‐use of the service were investigated and results are reported in this paper, using graphs and citing quotes from interviewed users, adding a qualitative perspective to the research.FindingsFindings have enabled the defining of the level of users' satisfaction and also evaluating the impact on users of this digital service.Research limitations/implicationsThe limitations of this research are discussed and some recommendations about new activities to plan for service improvement are also defined.Originality/valueAs there was no previous study of this kind at the University of Calabria, this work can be considered useful in order to fill the gap and is a good starting point for further improvements.

TREC: Improving information access through evaluation

Les premiers ateliers du TREC (Text REtrieval Conference) ont fait leur apparition en 1992 avec l'appui du NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). Concu a l'origine pour construire une vaste collection test et explorer les problemes associes a l'utilisation de cette collection, le TREC est devenu un laboratoire permettant de mesurer et d'accroitre l'efficacite des technologies de recherche, tout en etendant les experimentations a de nouveaux sous-problemes.

Facilitators and barriers to adoption of evidence-based perinatal care in Latin American hospitals: a qualitative study

Selective episiotomy and the active management of labor have been shown by numerous studies to benefit women's experience of labor as well as its outcomes. However, many Latin American public hospitals have not updated their clinical practices to reflect these findings. Limited access to new knowledge, limited time and physical resources and attitudes resistant to change are factors limiting the adoption of new practices in such hospitals. Interviews were conducted with three department heads, and focus groups were conducted with 31 physicians and midwives working in 10 public hospitals in Argentina and Uruguay. All were asked about facilitators and barriers to making changes in clinical practice. In addition, three focus groups were conducted with 16 pregnant women served by public hospitals. Responses were grouped according to stages of change in incorporating new evidence into practice. Numerous facilitators and barriers were identified by participants, as well as potential strategies for promoting change that could be incorporated into interventions. Barriers included limited access to information, negative attitudes toward changes in practice, lack of skills in performing new practices, lack of medical resources and explicit guidelines and a perceived need to practice defensive medicine. Changing long-standing clinical practice is difficult. Interventions must be adapted to translate evidence-based approaches to new cultures and contexts. Improving information access, use of role models, skill development and improved resources and support may be effective ways to overcome barriers to change in Latin American obstetric care.

Error Reduction in Surgical Pathology

Because of its complex nature, surgical pathology practice is inherently error prone. Currently, there is pressure to reduce errors in medicine, including pathology. To review factors that contribute to errors and to discuss error-reduction strategies. Literature review. Multiple factors contribute to errors in medicine, including variable input, complexity, inconsistency, tight coupling, human intervention, time constraints, and a hierarchical culture. Strategies that may reduce errors include reducing reliance on memory, improving information access, error-proofing processes, decreasing reliance on vigilance, standardizing tasks and language, reducing the number of handoffs, simplifying processes, adjusting work schedules and environment, providing adequate training, and placing the correct people in the correct jobs. Surgical pathology is a complex system with ample opportunity for error. Significant error reduction is unlikely to occur without a sustained comprehensive program of quality control and quality assurance. Incremental adoption of information technology and automation along with improved training in patient safety and quality management can help reduce errors.

Error Reduction in Surgical Pathology

Abstract Context.—Because of its complex nature, surgical pathology practice is inherently error prone. Currently, there is pressure to reduce errors in medicine, including pathology. Objective.—To review factors that contribute to errors and to discuss error-reduction strategies. Design.—Literature review. Results.—Multiple factors contribute to errors in medicine, including variable input, complexity, inconsistency, tight coupling, human intervention, time constraints, and a hierarchical culture. Strategies that may reduce errors include reducing reliance on memory, improving information access, error-proofing processes, decreasing reliance on vigilance, standardizing tasks and language, reducing the number of handoffs, simplifying processes, adjusting work schedules and environment, providing adequate training, and placing the correct people in the correct jobs. Conclusions.—Surgical pathology is a complex system with ample opportunity for error. Significant error reduction is unlikely to occur without...

Identifying strategies to improve access to credible and relevant information for public health professionals: a qualitative study.

BackgroundMovement towards evidence-based practices in many fields suggests that public health (PH) challenges may be better addressed if credible information about health risks and effective PH practices is readily available. However, research has shown that many PH information needs are unmet. In addition to reviewing relevant literature, this study performed a comprehensive review of existing information resources and collected data from two representative PH groups, focusing on identifying current practices, expressed information needs, and ideal systems for information access.MethodsNineteen individual interviews were conducted among employees of two domains in a state health department – communicable disease control and community health promotion. Subsequent focus groups gathered additional data on preferences for methods of information access and delivery as well as information format and content. Qualitative methods were used to identify themes in the interview and focus group transcripts.ResultsInformants expressed similar needs for improved information access including single portal access with a good search engine; automatic notification regarding newly available information; access to best practice information in many areas of interest that extend beyond biomedical subject matter; improved access to grey literature as well as to more systematic reviews, summaries, and full-text articles; better methods for indexing, filtering, and searching for information; and effective ways to archive information accessed. Informants expressed a preference for improving systems with which they were already familiar such as PubMed and listservs rather than introducing new systems of information organization and delivery. A hypothetical ideal model for information organization and delivery was developed based on informants' stated information needs and preferred means of delivery. Features of the model were endorsed by the subjects who reviewed it.ConclusionMany critical information needs of PH practitioners are not being met efficiently or at all. We propose a dual strategy of: 1) promoting incremental improvements in existing information delivery systems based on the expressed preferences of the PH users of the systems and 2) the concurrent development and rigorous evaluation of new models of information organization and delivery that draw on successful resources already operating to deliver information to clinical medical practitioners.

Designing New Methodologies for Integrating Biomedical Information in Clinical Trials

To propose a modification to current methodologies for clinical trials, improving data collection and cost-efficiency. To describe a system to integrate distributed and heterogeneous medical and genetic databases for improving information access, retrieval and analysis of biomedical information. Data for clinical trials can be collected from remote, distributed and heterogeneous data sources. In this distributed scenario, we propose an ontologybased approach, with two basic operations: mapping and unification. Mapping outputs the semantic model of a virtual repository with the information model of a specific database. Unification provides a single schema for two or more previously available virtual repositories. In both processes, domain ontologies can improve other traditional approaches. Private clinical databases and public genomic and disease databases (e.g., OMIM, Prosite and others) were integrated. We successfully tested the system using thirteen databases containing clinical and biological information and biomedical vocabularies. We present a domain-independent approach to biomedical database integration, used in this paper as a reference for the design of future models of clinico-genomic trials where information will be integrated, retrieved and analyzed. Such an approach to biomedical data integration has been one of the goals of the IST INFOBIOMED Network of Excellence in Biomedical Informatics, funded by the European Commission, and the new ACGT (Advanced Clinico-Genomic Trials on Cancer) project, where the authors will apply these methods to research experiments.

The Rural Hospital Electronic Library of Michigan (RHELM) Project

Personnel of many small rural hospitals provide health care without the benefits of a formal medical library. To improve information access, staff at Synergy Medical Education Alliance (Synergy Medical) designed and implemented a program to deliver electronic knowledge-based information resources to rural health professionals. The National Library of Medicine awarded an Internet Access to Digital Libraries (IADL) grant that funded the RHELM Web site production, equipment, and training. During the first phase three hospitals participated. In the second phase the project added two more hospitals and a county health department. Evaluation questionnaires and usage tracking showed the favorable impact of the project.

Home telehealth—Current state and future trends

The purpose of this paper is to give an overview about the state of the art in research on home telehealth in an international perspective. The study is based on a review of the scientific literature published between 1990 and 2003 and retrieved via Medline in January/February 2004. All together, the abstracts of 578 publications have been analyzed. The majority of publications (44%) comes from the United States, followed by UK and Japan. Most publications deal with vital sign parameter (VSP) measurement and audio/video consultations ("virtual visits"). Publications about IT tools for improved information access and communication as well as decision support for staff, patients and relatives are relatively sparse. Clinical application domains are mainly chronic diseases, the elderly population and paediatrics. Internationally, we observe a trend towards tools and services not only for professionals but also for patients and citizens. However, their impact on the patient-provider relationship and their design for special user groups, such as elderly and/or disabled needs to be further explored. In general, evaluation studies are rare and further research is critical to determine the impacts and benefits, and limitations, of potential solutions and to overcome a number of hinders and restrictions, such as - the lack of standards to combine incompatible information systems; - the lack of an evaluation framework considering legal, ethical, organisational, clinical, usability and technical aspects; - the lack of proper guidelines for practical implementation of home telehealth solutions.

Report on the TREC 2004 genomics track

The goal of the TREC Genomics Track is to create test collections for evaluation of information retrieval (IR) and related tasks in the genomics domain. The Genomics Track differs from the other TREC tracks in that it is focused on retrieval in a specific domain. Initially the track has focused on modeling advanced users accessing the scientific literature. The advanced users include biomedical scientists and database curators or annotators. New advances in biotechnologies have changed the face of biological research, particularly "high-throughput" techniques such as gene microarrays (Mobasheri, Airley et al., 2004). These not only generate massive amounts of data but also have led to an explosion of new scientific knowledge. As a result, this domain is ripe for improved information access and management.

Editorial. JNM editorial for May 2005 - Managing nursing in an increasingly complex environment of care

Editorial. JNM editorial for May 2005 - Managing nursing in an increasingly complex environment of care

Partnership as a New Paradigm for Reference Librarians in African Studies

SUMMARY This article examines the changing paradigms of reference librarianship as they relate to the study of Africa. It discusses important issues to do with the role of the reference librarian in assisting future scholarly research. Particular attention is given to how electronic resources are influencing the nature of Africana reference services and collection development. Given the problems faced in accessing information from Africa, emphasis is also placed on how partnerships between U.S. and African libraries and scholarly institutions can help improve information access in and about Africa.

Rule-based query personalization in digital libraries

Searching a digital library is typically a tedious task. A system can improve information access by building on knowledge about a user acquired in a user profile in order to customize information access both in terms of the information returned in response to a query (query personalization) as well as in terms of the presentation of the results (presentation personalization). In this paper, we focus on query personalization in digital libraries; in particular, we address structured queries involving metadata stored in relational databases. We describe the specification of user preferences at the level of a user profile and the process of query personalization with the use of query-rewriting rules.

Approach to mobile information and communication for health care

Evidence suggests that inadequate access to information and ineffective communication are proximal causes of errors and other adverse events in-patient care. Within the context of reducing these proximal causes of errors, we explore the use of novel information-based approaches to improve information access and communication in health care settings. This paper describes the approaches for and the design of extensions to a clinical information system used to improve information access and communication at the point of care using information-based handheld wireless applications. These extensions include clinical and information resources, event monitoring, and a virtual whiteboard (VWB).

Adaptive user interface customization through browsing knowledge capitalization

Hypermedia data browsing is a mean for improving information access. However, the overload and the heterogeneity of medical information, as well as the multitude of possible navigational paths, turn the consultation of data into a difficult task. We present in this paper a solution for the development of adaptive user interfaces in a hypermedia data browsing environment. It is based on the capitalization of the users knowledge in the decision-making process, expressed in terms of navigational paths and of data presentation modes that are customized to the user's preferences and practice. This capitalization offers the user a way to automatically store and reuse the experience accumulated in browsing through patient records. We illustrate our approach with the implementation of HEMA, a clinical workstation prototype that we have specialized for the cardiology domain.

A metadata approach to manage and organize electronic documents and collections on the web

In recent years, the number of information sources offered on the Web has grown tremedously. Support for accessing these information sources has mostly been concentrated on browsing and search tools. Digital libraries and Web directories constitute important initiatives to improve information access, creating and organizing document collections hierarchically, according to different criteria. Search tools, on the other hand, offer a more comprehensive coverage of resources, using robot-based services to collect and index documents, that can be latter accessed using information retrieval techniques. However, technologies applied to search mechanisms on the Web still offer little support to manage document collections, as the association between these documents cannot be explicitly identified, neither by their formats nor by their types. This paper presents a formal structure for organizing and describing collections and their documents on the Web. It is based on a metadata conceptual model which explores relationships between information resources at different levels of granularity. To validate this model, a prototype has been implemented using both a semi-structured and an object-relational database (DB) approach.

Discovering user communities on the Internet using unsupervised machine learning techniques

Interest in the analysis of user behaviour on the Internet has been increasing rapidly, especially since the advent of electronic commerce. In this context, we argue here for the usefulness of constructing communities of users with common behaviour, making use of machine learning techniques. In particular, we assume that the users of any service on the Internet constitute a large community and we aim to construct smaller communities of users with common characteristics. The paper presents the results of three case studies for three different types of Internet service: a digital library, an information broker and a Web site. Particular attention is paid on the different types of information access involved in the three case studies: query-based information retrieval, profile-based information filtering and Web-site navigation. Each type of access imposes different constraints on the representation of the learning task. Two different unsupervised learning methods are evaluated: conceptual clustering and cluster mining. One of our main concerns is the construction of meaningful communities that can be used for improving information access on the Internet. Analysis of the results in the three case studies brings to surface some of the important properties of the task, suggesting the feasibility of a common methodology for the three different types of information access on the Internet.

Assessing Belief Differences in Small Business Adopters and Non-Adopters of Web-Based E-Commerce

This study analyzes the differences in the beliefs of small business executives regarding the adoption of web-based e-commerce. Based on the Theory of Planned Behavior, behavioral, normative and control beliefs were compared of small business executives who had already adopted web-based e-commerce and those who had not yet adopted web-based e-commerce. There was a statistically significant difference between the two groups regarding the behavioral beliefs of enhancing the distribution of information, improving information accessibility, improving communication and increasing the speed with which the company gets things done. There was also a difference in the two groups regarding security, cost and training issues related to web-based e-commerce. finally, there was a difference in the normative beliefs of the two groups. The adopters were influenced more by their social referent groups than were the non-adopters.

Improving information access for public health professionals.

Fundamental to our protection against biological weapons and the detection of disease outbreaks is the need to strengthen our surveillance systems. Improved electronic communications between local, state, and federal public health agencies provide a way for health officials to share information on unusual disease outbreaks and provide important health alert information. This article describes a model of a partnership between a regional medical library of the National Library of Medicine, a school of public health, and federally qualified community health centers. This project upgraded technology and provided public health professional training on Internet information and resources for local public health agencies.