Health Sciences Administration

Health Sciences Library HealthLinks Webpage Development

HealthLinks is a collaborative project of Health Sciences Administration, the Health Sciences Libraries and the six Health Sciences schools. The goal of HealthLinks is to connect faculty, staff and students with quality information resources in the Health Sciences in support of lifelong learning, research and healthcare. It is structured for use at the point of need by clinicians, researchers, administrators, instructors and students within a distributed and multi-state educational environment. Students and faculty located both on campus and at training sites through the five-state WWAMI (Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho) region access the website. The primary user population consists of more than 10,000 students, faculty and health professionals.

HealthLinks is the portal of choice for Health Sciences, receiving 4.5 million hits in the 1998/99 academic year. It is widely accessed from outside the University by corporate, education and consumer sites.

Mission and Goals

HealthLinks supports the Warren G. Magnuson Health Sciences Center mission in the following ways:

• Educating and training health professionals for the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest
• Contributing to the advancement of knowledge through support of basic and applied research programs
• Providing citizens of the state and region with access to up-to-date health information
• Providing specialized information resources for the training of future educators and research scientists
• Contributing to the ongoing quality of health care in the state and region through access to quality information resources for practicing health professionals

Future Directions

• Expand the database model and search capability for the site. During the past year, a database model for the site was developed. We are now ready to re-engineer HealthLinks into a database that provides streamlined content addition and updates, personalized user profiles, and sophisticated search capabilities.
• Develop a model to streamline the creation of local information resources that minimizes the effort of content providers. The proposed framework will be based on XML standards for input from the creators into the database. Output will focus not only on html page display, but also on "web clipping" to allow users to synchronize specific information pieces to their Palm PC and desktop.

The Provost's Office
provost@u.washington.edu
Modified: May 11, 2004