MLA News: Selected Articles

April 1999

Content Comparison of Chapter Websites

Edited by Karen M. Zundel, AHIP

Submitted by Kris Markovich, AHIP, NN/LM Middle Atlantic Region, New York Academy of Medicine

Chapter Websites are an important communication and advertising tool. The development and design of chapter Websites is often mentioned as being an important chapter activity in the MLA News and elsewhere. As 1998 was nearing its end and the New York-New Jersey (NY-NJ) Chapter was gaining a new Web manager, the chapter decided that a review of its Website would be in order. While a cursory look at other chapter sites for comparison was enlightening, a more systematic survey seemed to be more useful.

The purpose of this survey was to compare the NY-NJ Chapter Website with other chapter sites in regard to:

• amount and type of information linked directly from the "front" page, and
• amount and type of information available on the overall site.

The chapter hoped to use the data to identify potential areas for improvement on its own Website and hoped that other chapter Web managers would find the survey results to be a valuable benchmarking tool. The survey took place during the first week of January 1999.

Using the links to chapter Websites on MLANET (www.mlanet.org/chapters/chapters.html), thirteen chapter Websites were examined and contents were tallied for comparison. Categories were taken from items listed on the front page, though some categories such as "What's New" and "Announcements" were combined. The number of items on each site was totaled to provide a benchmark.

In an effort to conserve space, the two charts list only the top ten content items appearing on the thirteen chapter Websites and a number indicating how many chapters listed that item. Two more detailed charts, showing all content items and a breakdown by chapter, can be viewed on the NY-NJ Chapter site (www.nyam.org/chapter).

Chart 1. Survey of Front Page
The number of content items on the front page ranged from six to sixteen with a median of eleven. The top ten items were:

 

Items	# of chapters
Annual meeting	12
Membership	11
Officers/board	10
Sites/association links*	10
Committee	9
About	8
MLA	8
History	7
Email discussion lists/Emailer	6
Special/SIGS	6
* Combined for home page analysis, but broken down for site analysis.

Chart 2. Survey of Overall Page
The number of content items on the entire Website ranged from eight to twenty with a median of seventeen. The top ten items were:

 

Items	# of chapters
Officer listing	13
Committee listing	13
Membership form	13
Annual meeting	12
Committee charges/recruiting	10
Constitution or bylaws	10
Email discussion lists	10
Honors and awards	8
History	8
Link to MLA†	6
† Combined for home page analysis, but broken down for site analysis.

When compared to the front page of the other chapter Websites, the NY-NJ Chapter had nine of the top ten content items and was at the median for home page information. When compared to overall contents, the NY-NJ Chapter Website contained fewer items than the median for site information, so adding content is a priority. The chapter hopes that other chapter Web managers will find the survey information useful as well.

Thanks to my fellow NY-NJ Chapter Co-Web manager, Pat Gallagher, AHIP, for her help with this article.

Medical Informatics: Focus on Metadata

Edited by Virginia A. Lingle, AHIP

Submitted by Elizabeth Connor, AHIP, Medical Informatics Section Member and Medical University of South Carolina-Charleston

Editor's Note: This article is the final piece in a four-part series written by members of the Medical Informatics Section. Thanks to Trudy A. Gardner, Ph.D., from Rush University, Chicago, who coordinated the series.

Recent efforts to define and standardize the use of metadata (descriptive data) and metadata schemata (frameworks for describing content) will help improve search precision, filter content, develop content repositories, foster collaboration, manage usage rights, improve interoperability, and permit reuse of Web-based resources.

Individuals interested in developing seamless interfaces to internal and external resources, building better search engines, and customizing content for different users will want to follow the progress of several ongoing projects:

• ARIADNE (Alliance of Remote Instructional Authoring and Distribution Networks) at ariadne.unil.ch is a collaborative effort among European Union countries to produce, manage, and reuse computer-based instructional content. ARIADNE tools help tag metadata, develop multiple choice questions, digitize video, and generate hypertext.
• The DOI (Digital Object Identifier) system at www.doi.org standardizes the definition, identification, and authentication of digital objects. Called the ISBN of the next century, the DOI promises to be more stable and reliable than the uniform resource locator (URL).
• The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative at purl.oclc.org/dc refers to a standard set of fifteen descriptive elements, which are added to the source code of Web pages to add value to the content and improve search engine retrieval. Representing participation from more than twenty countries, the project unifies standards for data content description, utilizing a model more economical than the full MARC record.
• The Instructional Management Systems (IMS) Project at www.imsproject.org has developed and defined standards to facilitate the location, distribution, and collaborative use of Web-based instructional content. The technical specifications proposed by the IMS Project relate to five areas: metadata, content, management, profiles, and external interfaces.
• The Medical Core Metadata (MCM) Project at the Oregon Health Sciences University represents their collaboration with the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to improve retrieval of relevant biomedical documents from the Internet, especially through Medical World Search at www.mwsearch.com. Use the Medical Metadata Creator at medir.ohsu.edu/bicc-informatics/ebm/latest.htm to generate metadata for existing Web documents.
• Project Isaac (Information Seeker's Avenue to Authoritative Content) at scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/research/ is a collaboration of independently maintained resources linked by a common search interface that utilizes Dublin Core metadata elements. Project Isaac is an initiative of the Internet Scout Project located at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, co-sponsored by the Coalition for Networked Information at www.cni.org, and funded by the National Science Foundation. A typical Project Isaac collaborator is eLib at www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/metadata.html. Metadata elements for eLib's Web pages are dynamically converted to an extensible markup language (XML) representation of resource description framework (RDF) as pages are requested.
• Resource Description Framework (RDF) at www.w3.org/TR/PR-rdf-syntax was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as a metadata scheme that will facilitate interoperability including secure commercial authentication ("Web of Trust").

Metadata can be used to prevent caching of files, or to prompt users to request a newer version of the page. Although metadata is stored with the Web objects, in the near future, metadata will be embedded in or wrapped around objects, allowing greater granularity, flexibility, and interoperability. Content can be explained, adapted, sorted, managed and customized differently for different users.

Bibliography

Ahronheim JR. Descriptive metadata: emerging standards. J Acad Libr 1998 Sep;24(5):395–402.

Chepesiuk R. Organizing the Internet: the "core" of the challenge. Am Libr 1999 Jan;30(1):60–3.

Exner N. Increasing Web site visibility: meta tags and search engines. MLA News 1998 Aug;308:8.

Neil S. Metadata: the matchmaker of the Web. PC Week 1998 May 4;15(18):87.

Websites: Spinal Cord Injury

Edited by Melissa L. Just

Submitted by Sharon E. Hunt, Spinal Cord Injury Network International, Santa Rosa, CA

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a devastating event, with individuals facing a lifetime of specialized care and rehabilitation. Each year, approximately 10,000 individuals suffer an SCI; there are estimated to be between 183,000 and 230,000 SCI individuals in the United States today (National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center, 1998). SCI has been in the news in recent years due to exciting research being done in this field and to actor Christopher Reeve's campaign to increase awareness of this health issue. These Websites offer information, links, and forums relating to SCI.