Reusable Assets for Health Sciences Education: The Health Education Assets Library (HEAL)

Sandra McIntyre
Program Manager
Health Education Assets Library (HEAL)

Introduction

Health sciences educators increasingly rely on multimedia educational materials for their teaching, but creating or finding high-quality multimedia remains a challenge for many. The Health Education Assets Library (HEAL) was formed to facilitate the sharing of resources in a freely accessible digital library, with items organized in a highly searchable database.

The Health Education Assets Library

Background

HEAL was established in 2000 as a component of the National Science Digital Library with initial funding for research and infrastructure development from the National Science Foundation. NSF funding was extended in 2002 for collection development. Funding for expanded development was provided in 2003 under two grants from the National Library of Medicine. HEAL has co-directors at three institutions: Sebastian Uijtdehaage, Ph.D., at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA; Sharon Dennis, M.S., at the Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library at the University of Utah; and Chris Candler, M.D., at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine.

Collection

The HEAL team has set up partnerships with numerous faculty, medical schools, and other organizations that maintain collections of health sciences resources. With their collaboration, HEAL's collection has grown to 36,000 resources, including images, videos, audios, animations, presentations, portable documents (PDF's), and Web pages. While the initial emphasis is on undergraduate and graduate professional education, eventually HEAL will cover a wide scope of health education topics, including patient and consumer health. The goal is a sizable, diversified collection available through a single web-based application that seamlessly accesses a distributed network of collections.

Metadata

Each item in the HEAL digital library is described by a set of cataloging information, or metadata, such as title, keywords, usage rights, etc. -- twenty-six elements in all, of which eight are required. The HEAL team developed its metadata standard following research into a number of metadata standards developed by national and international standards organizations. The resulting customized HEAL metadata schema is based on the Educause IMS, which in turn builds on both the Dublin Core and IEEE Learning Objects Metadata standards. It has been extended to include additional health sciences-related elements, including specimen type, radiograph type, orientation, magnification, disease process, and clinical history. In addition, items are cataloged with the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) controlled vocabulary of keywords.

The HEAL team has joined with the MedBiquitous Education Working Group to use the HEAL schema as a basis for creating a new MedBiquitous standard, the Medical Asset Metadata Standard, in the coming months. The certification and use of this new standard will contribute to the interoperability and reusability of digital materials for medical education.

Sample of HEAL Metadata Schema

Application

To provide online access to the multimedia resources in the database, the team developed an open-source web-based application that allows users to search, browse, download, or upload multimedia files, and for internal cataloging and approval tasks. Users may search by a simple text string or by combinations of metadata fields. Selected files may be added to a download folder for downloading as a group in a compressed format.

For maximal scalability, the application is organized into an n-tiered software architecture, separating presentation, programming logic, and data into different tiers. The application uses non-proprietary technologies such as Java Server Pages (JSP), Java Beans, Java servlets, and eXtensible Markup Language (XML). An institution-specific version of the HEAL code is under development for local use by medical schools.

Contributions

Users are invited to contribute multimedia files directly to the HEAL system through a simple web-based wizard. Uploaded items are then added to an internal approval queue; a professional cataloger reviews each item against quality assurance criteria and assigns additional metadata before the item is made available to the public. Additional ingestion methods, including Open Archives Initiative metadata harvesting, are available for those wishing to contribute larger collections to the library.

Response to HEAL has been excellent, with over 6,000 registered users, 60,000 pageviews per month, and approximately 60 partner organizations. More information on HEAL is available at http://www.healcentral.org. We welcome your feedback and suggestions.