HDL 2003: Healthcare Digital Libraries
Workshop 2003
to be held in conjunction with ECDL 2003
21st August 2003, Trondheim, Norway
Workshop Chairs:
Patty Kostkova, Institute of Health Sciences, City University, London, UK
Anne Adams, UCL Interaction Centre, UCL, London, UK
Workshop Review and Follow-Up Actions
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Talks now available |
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Talks presented at HDL 2003 are now available online. Click on the speaker icon on the abstracts page for download: |
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Workshop Pictures now available |
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Some interesting pictures to remind you of the event are now available on the new pictures page. |
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HDL 2004: the initial plan |
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Based on the success of HDL 2003, Anne and I decided to put in proposal for HDL 2004 to be held in conjunction with ECDL 2004 conference. This will take place in Bath, UK on September 12-16, 2004. You will be informed on time about this proposal. |
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HDL Mailing List |
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An HDL participants mailing list was set up to encourage and simplify communication in the community around health digital libraries. In order to utilize this mailing list in full please feel free to use it for informal discussions, conferences and workshops promotions and for sharing your research results and experience. Also, you can encourage your colleagues and friends interested in health digital libraries to join the list by visiting: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/healthcare_digitallibraries To clarify, the list is not restricted to those who attended the workshop; it is open to everyone. Anyone can send an email to the group by emailing to: healthcare_digitallibraries@yahoogroups.com without joining the group. |
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Workshop Report published at D-Lib: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september03/09inbrief.html |
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ECDL
2003 Workshop Report: Healthcare Digital Libraries (HDL 2003) Contributed by: Organised by Anne Adams of UCLIC and Patty Kostkova of City University, this workshop—held in conjunction with the 7th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL 2003) held in Trondheim, Norway on 17 - 22 August— brought together approximately a dozen practitioners and researchers, each of whom had an interest—in one way or another—in the design, implementation, deployment or use of digital libraries (DLs) and similar technologies in the domain of Healthcare. The presenters at this workshop reflected a number of perspectives on different information technology (IT) initiatives, some proposing new technical solutions to problems in the healthcare domain, some offering evaluations and explications of the impact of current programmes, and several urging a critical examination of the social and organisational implications of healthcare DLs. The workshop opened with an invited talk by Rob Procter, Edinburgh University, who outlined Edinburgh University's Social Informatics approach, which involves studying and supporting design through the use of technology in context. Rob's critique of digital libraries from an ethnographic angle, highlighted the fact that searching and information finding are often stereotyped as individual tasks, divorced from any social, organisational or material context. The Social Informatics corrective is to use ethnographic field research to understand the circumstances in which activities occur, as well as their relationship to their context. A case study of this mode of research focused on the Scottish Poisons Information Service and the use within that service of TOXBASE, a searchable online DL containing information on toxins and treatments for poisoning. The service is used directly by medical professionals in support of diagnosis and patient treatment, and it also supports operators of a telephone helpline service. The talk emphasised the importance of the service's telephone operators as intermediaries, mediating between the information needs of medical practitioners and the digital resources. In addition to operators being familiar with TOXBASE and possessing the specialised skills necessary to use it effectively, in their role as intermediaries the operators bring other benefits to the system. For instance, doctors appear to have greater confidence in information gained over the helpline, even though they could have accessed the same TOXBASE resource directly themselves. Anne Adams (University College, London, UK) presented a fascinating study of "outreach librarians" supporting the deployment of digital library systems to address the needs of teams of psychiatric practitioners. The librarian's role was to support practitioners' information seeking activities and to contribute more generally to the implementation of Evidence Based Medicine. It was observed that the librarian's role grew to encompass a wide range of information-related concerns, and the librarian's presence seemed to raise the profile and importance of information in clinical discussion and practice. Furthermore, many unexpected benefits, such as improved cross-team communication and increased confidence of individuals in making use of information resources, were apparent. The study makes a strong case for digital libraries as more than just technology, highlighting the importance of librarians as intermediaries who are able to cross the boundaries between clinical practice and digital resources. Gemma Madle (City University, UK) spoke about a project to develop an online community of practice around the National Electronic Library for Communicable Diseases. This work was inspired by the realisation of a number of important issues in the development of such a resource relating to quality control, the inclusion of controversial material and the timeliness of research results. Issues such as these may be best addressed by a community of practitioners concerned with content provision and quality review, and consequently, a collection of online resources to allow members of the community to interact has been implemented. Madle's talk provoked a great deal of interesting discussion about building and sustaining communities around digital libraries and review processes, and about ways of achieving participation in the review community. Bryan Manning (European Federation for Medical Informatics) raised a range of issues connected with technologies supporting coordination of work across people and professions in complex clinical processes. The approach he outlined had to do with modelling workflows involved in clinical processes, and the identification of major related activities. One use of such modelling was to designing electronic "crib sheets" to aid medical practitioners in making decisions. Repositories of such "crib sheet" information could be delivered to practitioners through handheld user interfaces, and notes made by the practitioner as tasks are carried out could be used to automatically generate parts of the patient record. Bob Fields (Middlesex University, UK) talked about further issues in the development of digital information resources, in particular Electronic Patient Records (EPR) and Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR). In his talk, he proposed a set of concepts that will provide the analytic cornerstone of a forthcoming study of the implementation of EPRs and EHRs. The conceptual framework analyses how individuals work together, share information and hold meanings in "common information spaces", and between different communities through the creation of "boundary objects". EHRs can be viewed as precisely this sort of boundary-crossing object, and their design can be informed by studies of the kinds of coordination EHRs are intended to support. Patty Kostkova (City University, UK) reviewed the National electronic Library for Communicable Diseases (NeLCD), which is being developed at City University. This library provides a portal to evidence-based information on treatment, investigation and prevention of communicable disease. Patty discussed the use of autonomous intelligent agents within the library to support search, information publishing, peer review and data exchange. In particular, Intelligent Search Agents (ISA) and Pro-active Alert Agents (PAA) were used to support user profiling and customisation of the library to suit personal preferences, backgrounds and medical specialties. Thorsten Kurz (University of Neuchatel, Switzerland) discussed methods and tools to improve and personalise access to concepts within healthcare ontologies. In particular these methods and tools were used for two ontologies regarded as vital within the Swiss healthcare system: the ICD 10 and the TARMED ontology. Development and testing of the tools' basic functionality is currently underway along with evaluation of the user interface design. Pedro Sousa (Universidade de Nova de Lisboa, Portugal) presented an agent-based web content categorization system supported by a framework for Internet data collection. The importance of the system learning process was emphasised, ranging from the sample's database creation, automatic feature selection, classifiers' induction and decision support system definition. The presenter highlighted the applicability of this system within the health domain to reduce information overload for busy clinicians. At the end of the day, an extended discussion highlighted that digital libraries could have a powerful positive impact upon the health domain. However, across Europe, the health domains' rigid hierarchies, as well as clinicians' negative perceptions of technology, have hindered digital library uptake. Technological change, it was noted, can support or work counter to user needs. The question raised in discussion was how to increase successful technological uptake. Some workshop participants proposed systems designed according to user needs that would be implemented through communities who thus felt ownership in the technology. Still other participants proposed legislative enforcement of change. Additional workshop discussions reviewed digital library issues of provenance, privacy, data protection and security. More information about the ECDL 2003 workshop on Healthcare Digital Libraries (HDL 2003) and the work presented there is available from <http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~patty/HDL2003/HDL%202003%20Workshop%20Top.html>. |
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More information … |
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For more information, please contact Patty (patty@soi.city.ac.uk) or Anne (a.adams@cs.ucl.ac.uk) Looking forward to hearing from you.
Patty Kostkova and Anne Adams HDL 2003 chairs |