ilp.html

The Medical Radiography Home Page

A distributed hypermedia index of resources for radiologic technologists, students, and educators

An Independent Learning Project presented

by

Richard Terrass, R.T.(R)

to

Lynne Sussman, Ph.D.
Faculty Advisor

in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of

Master of Education
in the field of

Integrated Studies

Cambridge College

at Cambridge, Massachusetts

Abstract

The Medical Radiography Home Page is a WorldWide Web based distributed hypermedia index designed to support both scholarly research and casual browsing with a single intuitive interface. The index includes links to a wide variety of resources of interest to radiologic science professionals, students, and educators including Web based tutorials, educational software and software demos, electronic journals and other publications, Internet search engines and indexes, virtual libraries, medical image databases and teaching files. Technologists and students will find the Medical Radiography Home Page to be a valuable reference tool as well as a convenient starting point for research. Educators will find information and tutorials which will help show how other educators have creatively integrated the wealth of resources available on the Internet into their curricula, as well as links to a variety of education, assessment, educational technology, general science, multimedia authoring, and web development sites.

Abstract
Contents
An Introduction To the Medical Radiography Home Page
A Review of the Literature on Hypertext, HTML, and the
WorldWide Web for Information Providers
The Dream
Hypertext and the Roots of the WorldWide Web
Weaving the Web
Strengths and Weaknesses of the WWW
The Web as an Information Resource
Challenges and Decisions Facing Information
Providers
Methodology: Building An Information Resource
Identifying Relevant Resources
Resource Discovery
Validating Web Based Resources
Web Site Design and Implementation
HTML Mark-up and Testing
Summary of Learning
Information Access
Information Appraisal
Information Management
Information Dissemination
HTML Authoring and Web Site Implementation
Assessing the Value of the Medical Radiography Home Page
As An Information Resource
The Value of Information
Peer Evaluation of Content and Aesthetics
Reliability
Patterns of Use
January, 1996
February, 1996
March, 1996
Average Daily Users by Week
Discipline Specific Resources Used To Compile the Medical
Radiography Home Page
General ResourcesUsed To Compile the Medical
Radiography Home Page
References

An Introduction To the Medical Radiography Home Page

The Medical Radiography Home Page is designed to be a gateway to learning through exploration for radiologic technologists, students, educators and others interested in the radiologic sciences. It is a WorldWide Web based distributed hypermedia index designed to support both scholarly research and casual browsing with a single simple intuitive interface. The index includes links to a wide variety of resources of interest to radiologic science professionals, students, and educators. Among the resources which can be accessed through this site are Web based tutorials, educational software and demos available for download by File Transfer Protocol (FTP), electronic journals and other publications, Internet search engines, virtual libraries, medical image databases and teaching files. Educators will find information and tutorials which will help show how other educators have creatively integrated the wealth of resources available on the Internet into their curricula, as well as links to a variety of education, assessment, educational technology, general science, multimedia authoring, and web development sites.

The roots of the Medical Radiography Home Page can be traced to my first explorations of the WorldWide Web (WWW) early in the summer of 1995. As an avid Internet "surfer" I quickly collected a bookmark file of several hundred URL's related to my interests as a radiologic technologist and as a clinical educator. I began looking for a resource guide which would would allow me to trim my unwieldy bookmark file but none of the guides met my need for a comprehensive guide to resources of interest to radiologic technologists, students, and educators. Armed with a growing interest in medical informatics, a desire to learn hypertext markup language (HTML), and my bookmark file I decided that I could meet that need.

I began this project with two basic premises. The first is that information on virtually any topic is available somewhere on the Internet if you know where and how to look for it. The second is that there are many possible ways to organize and classify information; we choose a particular scheme in any given situation based on a combination of availability, utility, personal preference and habit.

In searching the available radiology related guides I found that most were categorized by tool, by type of institution, or by geographic location. I found it awkward that many resource guides were organized in such a way that finding information was not as intuitive as possible. I found myself agreeing with Rosenfeld when he argues that the traditional method of categorizing resources in guides by tools is inadequate since most users are more likely interested in finding information on a sub-topic than in a list of all the web servers in a particular field. [Rosenfeld,1994] The guides I found most intuitive to use and thus felt most comfortable using were those organized by subspecialty. Since a resource guide derives its value from the value that users assign to it and from the frequency with which it is used, the value of an intuitive structure offering ease of use can not be underestimated.

A Review of the Literature on Hypertext, HTML, and the WorldWide Web for Information Providers

"Information technology must be viewed in an ecological context. Information systems do not stand alone; they effect and are affected by the operational environment. Understanding how information technology "fits" into the larger context is the key to its effective use." [Rathe, et al, 1995]

The Dream

Modern dreams of a universal information database accessible to people around the world date back to the late 1940's. [Hughes, 1993] [Bush, 1945] [Nelson, 1965] [Hirmes, 1993] Not only would the data be accessible to people around the world, but it would also "easily link to other pieces of information, so that only the most important data would be quickly found by a user." [Hughes, 1993] The technology which makes such systems possible, however, is a much more recent development. [Balasubramanian, 1994]

Efforts to realize the universal database envisioned by Bush and others have led to the emergence of a new class of complex information management systems based on hypertext. The strength of hypertext systems is that they allow people to create, annotate, link together, and share information from a variety of media. Hypertext systems provide a non-sequential and entirely new method of accessing information such as text, graphics, audio, video, animation, and software.unlike traditional information systems which are primarily sequential in nature. [Balasubramanian, 1994] They provide flexible access to information by incorporating the notions of navigation, annotation, and tailored presentation [Bieber, 1993]

The WorldWide Web, which is defined as a "wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents" [Hughes, 1993] is the most popular system currently in use.[Balasubramanian, 1994]

Hypertext and the Roots of the WorldWide Web

Most authors trace the concept on which hypertext and the WWW are built upon to July, 1945 when Bush commented: "The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, [but] the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships." [Bush, 1945] [Balasubramanian, 1994] [Nelson, 1965] [Hughes, 1993] [Hirmes, 1993] To sort through this maze Bush described the "memex", a conceptual device in which an "individual stores his books, records and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory." [Bush, 1945] The essential feature of memex was its ability to tie two items together. [Bush, 1945] [Balasubramanian, 1994] Bush felt that this associative method of information gathering was practical because it was closer to the way the mind ordered information. [Hirmes, 1993]

Nelson coined the word "hypertext" in his 1965 book, "Literary Machines." [Nelson, 1965] Nelson defined hypertext as "a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in a complex way that could not be conveniently represented on paper. It may contain summaries or maps of its contents and their interrelations; it may contain annotations, additions and footnotes from scholars who have examined it." [Nelson, 1965] Although Nelson did not limit the concept of hypertext to computers in the beginning, he soon realized "that the future of humanity is at the interactive computer screen, that the new writing and movies will be interactive and interlinked. It will be united by bridges of transclusion and we need a world-wide network to deliver it with royalty". [Nelson, 1994]

Hypertext is a hybrid that spans across traditional boundaries [Balasubramanian, 1994] As a database method, hypertext provides a novel way of directly accessing and managing data. It can also be viewed as "a representation scheme, a kind of semantic network, which mixes informal textual material with more formal and mechanized processes. It is an interface modality that features link icons or markers that can be arbitrarily embedded with the contents and can be used for navigational purposes." [Conklin, 1987] [Balasubramanian, 1994] Hypertext provides a unique method of accessing information. Traditional databases have some structure around them, however in a hypertext database the user is free to explore and assimilate information in different ways. [Nielsen, 1990] Hypertext promises to give users the ability to produce complex, richly connected and cross-referenced bodies of information, however,as Balasubramanian points out, "it can also become a complex system of tangled webs, confusing both authors and readers". [Balasubramanian, 1994] According to Conklin, disorientation and cognitive overhead are the two most challenging problems related to hypertext. He feels that these two problems "may ultimately limit the usefulness of hypertext." [Conklin, 1987] .

Weaving the Web

Building on Ted Nelson's ideas, Tim Berners-Lee of CERN conceived the idea of the World-Wide Web in 1989. [Relihan, et al.] According to Berners-Lee, the WWW project is based on the principle of universal readership: "if information is available, then any (authorized) person should be able to access it from anywhere in the world." [Levy, 1993] WWW documents are characterized by their hypertext structure: references can be graphically represented. "The user clicks on it with the mouse, and the referenced document appears." [Berners-Lee, et al, 1992] Perhaps the biggest advantage of this method is that it makes the copying of information unnecessary. Since the Web's implementation follows a standard client-server model, data only needs to be stored on one server and any documents or other data referenced to it can be linked to the original document. [Berners-Lee T. & Cailliau R, 1992] [Balasubramanian, 1994]

Strengths and Weaknesses of the WWW

The immense success of the World-Wide Web can be explained by both the nature of the World-Wide Web which provides a way to interconnect computers running different operating systems, and display information created in a variety of existing media formats and by CERN's attitude towards the development of the project. [Zeltser, 1995] [Relihan, et al.]

Once the basic outline of the WWW was complete, CERN made the source code for both its server and browser software publicly available. [CERN, 1996] The minimal system requirements for running a WWW server and the simplicity of the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), used for creating interactive documents, allowed these users to become information providers and contribute to the expanding database of documents on the Web.

Since the beginning of the WWW project CERN has been encouraging collaboration by academic and commercial parties. In less than six years the Web has grown from an untested concept to become the predominant way in which information is served over the Internet. Zeltser sees this as a double edged sword: the World-Wide Web began as a set of simple protocols and formats but as time passed, the Web "began to be used as a testbed for various sophisticated hypermedia and information retrieval concepts." [Relihan, et al.] [Zeltser, 1995] These concepts were quickly adopted by the general WWW community. "This means that experimental extensions of dubious use are now established parts of the Web." [Relihan, et al.]

The primary structural flaw in WWW is the presence of many broken hypertext links that point to documents which have been renamed, moved, or deleted from the Web by their authors. [Relihan, et al.] Since there is no way of registering links to one's document, an author can not notify his readers of any changes.[Zeltser, 1995]

The Web as an Information Resource

The challenges facing information providers and users on the WorldWide Web were summarized by December who wrote:

Web information encounters different patterns of peer review. Voices of experience are not always heard on the Web. Unlike the peer review processes formal scholarly work often undergoes, the traditions for Web information review are not mature. Often, Web information can encounter a maelstrom of comment and critique similar to what a Usenet FAQ list faces. In other cases, collaborators or experts in a field or topic assist in reviewing and correcting Web information. In still other cases, "peer review" has little meaning: personal information (home pages), artistic expressions, and other information on informal webs (opinion, descriptions, product information, etc.) doesn't necessarily require close critique aside from accuracy checks to be valuable. Moreover, measures of value and "correctness" gained from traditional media can't be applied to a medium that is highly dynamic and, by its nature, always incomplete. [December, 1994]

The nature of the Web places much of the burden of finding and validating resources on the information user. The value of the Web as an information resource is dependent upon the development of tools and methodologies for gathering, evaluating, managing, and presenting information. Along with these tools information providers must develop the skills to select and present present information on the Web.

According to Register, the pattern of development reflected in emerging scientific resources on the Internet resembles what Matheus, Chen, and Piatetsky-Shapiro describe as facilitating Knowledge Discovery in Databases. [Matheus, et al., 1993] [Register & Gerone, 1994] According to these researchers, the most useful information often exists outside the database in the form of "domain knowledge," unstructured knowledge that enables specialist users to recognize appropriate or potential uses of data or the relevance of information. [Register & Gerone, 1994] The danger, according to December, is that "(i)n an increasingly thin soup of redundant, poor quality, or incorrect information, even the smartest Web spiders won't be very effective. A flood of information unfiltered by the critical and noise-reducing influences of collaboration and peer review can overwhelm users and obscure the value of the Web itself." [December, 1994] December suggests that in order to help users sort through this sea of information, providers need to consider how their information can:

Meet user needs
Cue the user as to the level of quality and completeness in the information
Face some noise-reducing filtering or selectivity, as the result of review or critique where appropriate [December, 1994]

Rapid growth has made it difficult for users to easily browse alternate or multiple sources for the same or related information. There is now so much information that there is a real danger that no human being can adequately compare the value of available information sources on a particular subject or topic. This is known as saturation. Along with saturation, this growth tends to lead to "pollution"--redundant, erroneous, or poorly maintained information that can obscure other information. [December, 1994]

December argues that diversity of information and views is not pollution or saturation. Pollution and saturation occur when individual information providers fail to meet their user's needs or interests. [December, 1994] The challenge, according to December, "is for information providers to best define--according to the needs of their users--the content and presentation methods that define quality information so that their webs can meet user needs." [December, 1994]

Register sees a danger that by paying too little attention to both information content and user expertise the art of designing user interfaces could be reduced to a matter of technology or user psychology. [Register & Gerone, 1994] Register sees evidence that developers have become "much more interested in users' interactions with information and data. [Register & Gerone, 1994] "Many of the systems on the Web have", Register says, "incorporated insights about information-using behaviors of not only end users but also data providers and systems developers." [Register & Gerone, 1994]

Challenges and Decisions Facing Information Providers

While many Web users and information providers do not share the same level of concern expressed by Relihan "that experimental extensions of dubious use are now established parts of the Web" [Relihan, et al.], the various extensions to HTML have created difficult choices for information providers. [Siegel,1996] HTML is a markup language which means that information is "tagged" with general formatting information.[Berners-Lee & Connolly, 1995] Decisions about how information will be displayed have been left up to the client software (browser). [Engst, 1996] Many new tags have been proposed to give Web publishers more control over how their content is displayed or to extend the capabilities of the user interface. [Internet Engineering Task Force HTML Working Group, 1996] [Engst, 1996]

The driving force behind most of the widely used extensions to HTML is Netscape Communications whose Netscape Navigator browsers are used by an estimated 70% of Web users. [Engst, 1996] These extensions to HTML are currently supported to various degrees by many browser developers. [Graham, 1996] Most browsers will ignore tags which they don't support but this can often lead to information being presented in an unusable form. [Engst, 1996] It is possible for clever authors to design pages which take advantage of some extensions on savvy browsers while still displaying in an acceptable fashion on browsers which don't support a particular extension. [King,1996] [Engst, 1996] This means that information providers are forced to consider which tags to use and to test how their pages will appear on a variety of different browsers. In general, however, the coexistence of multiple "flavors" of HTML has required Web authors to choose between supporting multiple versions of of pages, creating "vanilla" pages which lack much of the graphic appeal and functionality that the vast majority of Web users have come to expect, or ignoring a significant segment of Web users. [Engst, 1996]

Building An Information Resource

Identifying Relevant Resources

The procedure for identifying relevant resources on the WorldWide Web is remarkably similar regardless of the subject area one is researching. The process I used in developing the Medical Radiography Home Page can be further subdivided into the identification of resources and the validation of resources. I will deal with each of these separately although, in practice, the two processes frequently occurred simultaneously.

Resource Discovery

Several tools have have been developed to help users locate resources on the WorldWide Web. Robots and spiders, members of a class of software known as intelligent agents, independently travel the Web cataloging everything in their path. These robots and spiders build remarkably complete indexes of in the course of their travels which can then be searched using a variety of search engines using a various algorithms to help users locate data. These engines are capable of searching by a number of criteria. Some search by keywords embedded in a document's metadata, some search for strings in a document's title or in a document's uniform resource locator (URL), and some search the full text of documents. Many are capable of conducting more than one type of search.

In the initial phase of identifying resources for possible inclusion in the Medical Radiography Home Page I discovered that the process of looking for information on the Web is similar to more traditional research methods in one important way. How you ask is as important as what you ask. Individual search engines generally offer both simple and advanced options for formulating queries of their databases. The secret to success when it comes to using search engines is understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the individual engines as well as mastering the art of formulating queries in such a way that only the information you are looking for is returned. Too general a query can easily result in the user being overwhelmed by several thousand citations of questionable value, while limiting the query too much can cause users to miss valuable resources.

The most valuable resource I found for locating relevant resources on the Web for inclusion in the Medical Radiography Home Page is the growing number of specialty webs. These include both multiple subject "one stop shopping" sites and discipline specific lists. Frequently these specialty webs are maintained as "official" resources by institutions or organizations. Other specialty webs are independently maintained by subject area experts. The most comprehensive lists are often not the lists from the"one-stop-shopping" sites, but those developed by people within the field. These discipline specific webs are well-known and frequently cited within the field, but not well-known outside it. [Rumsey, 1996] These specialty webs are divided between individual and collaborative efforts, however, many of these specialty webs progress from individual efforts to collaborative efforts as more people begin relying on them as a source of information.

The final method which has proved useful in identifying relevant Internet based resources is posting queries to relevant Usenet newsgroups and e mail listservers. This method has the added value of allowing two way communication and provides a valuable means of getting the input of subject area experts. This has been particularly helpful in validating resources.

Validating Web Based Resources

Validating Web based resources is an complex process, The distributed nature of the Web has tended to work against the development of centralized repositories for peer reviewed scholarly information on the Internet. Instead, anyone with access to a personal computer, minimal skills, and an account with any of the major online services or Internet service providers is encouraged to publish for a worldwide audience. The peer review process developed over more than one hundred years to validate scholarly publication is incapable of meeting the needs of scholarly publishers on the WorldWide Web. Open publication with evaluation by individual users has replaced peer review on the Web. Users are increasingly relying on specialty webs to provide an initial level of information filtering. As specialty webs have proliferated in the past two years, users are turning to meta directories to validate specialty webs.

Research has shown that when it comes to validating resources the most useful information often exists outside the database in the form of "domain knowledge, unstructured knowledge that enables specialist users to recognize appropriate or potential uses of data or the relevance of information. [Register & Gerone] For people within a field, validating resources in their specialty is a relatively intuitive process which occurs on both a conscious and unconscious level. Information providers, however, can not assume that their users will all possess the domain knowledge necessary to evaluate the validity of Web based resources. Information providers have an obligation to validate the resources they include in their sites.

Validating Web based resources requires looking at both the source and the content of individual resources. Information originating from "official" or other trusted sources is generally assumed to require a lesser degree of validation by information providers so long as the information does not appear on the surface to fall outside the realm of possibility. In using independent, specialty webs as a source of information, choosing those that are most frequently cited by people in the field provides a rudimentary form of peer evaluation. [Rumsey, 1996] The value of even this rudimentary form of peer evaluation should not be underestimated when the time comes to validate Web based resources.

Web Site Design and Implementation

The Medical Radiography Home Page has a flat file structure which greatly simplifies the creation of navigation links within the site, however, navigation within the site is handled in a manner which provides the user with the illusion of a hierarchical file structure. I chose to present the illusion of a hierarchical structure because it lessens the likelihood of users becoming disoriented when navigating through the site. Branching pathways which offer the user multiple navigational options not possible in a truly hierarchical file structure are relatively easy to handle within a flat file structure. The illusion is maintained by presenting the user with a consistent user interface.

An information resource only has value if it is accessible by potential users. I have attempted to achieve maximum availability and reliability for the Medical Radiography Home Page by "mirroring" the site on two geographically remote hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) servers. [WorldNET, Inc.] [America Online, Inc.] Should one server go down or be overloaded, users have the option of accessing the site on another server. The files which make up the site are available for download by anonymous file transfer protocol (FTP). This allows users with relatively low bandwidth connections to the Internet to save bandwidth by accessing the Medical Radiography Home Page as local pages.

HTML Mark-up and Testing

HTML mark-up of the pages used in the Medical Radiography Home Page was done on an a Macintosh Performa 475 with 12 MB RAM (Apple Computer, Inc.) using either HTML Web Weaver 2.5.2 [Best Enterprises], HTML Edit 1.0 [Giles, 1995], BB Edit Lite [Bare Bones Software, Inc.], or Adobe PageMill 1.0. [Adobe Systems, Inc.] The images used were created using Adobe Photoshop 2.5 [Adobe Systems, Inc.], were reduced to an 8 bit color palette using a diffusion dithering algorithm, and saved in the GIF 89a format. The resulting image files were then converted to interlaced GIFs using GrapicsConvertor 2.1.2 (US). [Lemke Software] Pages were uploaded to the servers using Fetch 3.0b6 [Dartmouth College] and the America Online 2.6 client software for Macintosh. [America Online, Inc]

The Medical Radiography Home Page was designed for optimal viewing with Netscape Navigator 1.1N or newer [Netscape Communications, Inc.] however any browser which supports the IETF Draft on tables for HTML 3.0 [Raggett D., 1996] should provide near optimal viewing. Browsers supporting the proposed standard for HTML 2.0 [Berners-Lee & Connolly, 1995] yield mixed although generally passable results. Pages were tested using Netscape Navigator 1.1N for Macintosh and for Windows as well as Netscape Navigator 2.0 for Macintosh [Netscape Communications, Inc.], NCSA Mosaic 2.0b9 [National Center for Supercomputing Applications], MacWeb 0.9 [TraedeWave], and the AOL Web Browser 1.0 for Macintosh. [America Online, Inc.]

Summary of Learning

Informatics and information management skills are increasingly important as a foundation for effective education, research, and practice in health professions. The Medical Radiography Home Page was conceived, designed, and implemented as a way to develop and demonstrate the informatics and information management skills and knowledge which I have identified as being of particular importance to my professional growth and development.The required skills and knowledge fall within five broad categories; information access, information appraisal, information management, information dissemination, and HTML authoring and Web site development.

Information Access

The most important information access requirement I face as a clinical educator in a health profession is the need to demonstrate an awareness of the diversity of knowledge resources which are available. These resources increasingly are stored and delivered in electronic form on networked computers. Because Internet based resources can exist on any of millions of computers anywhere in the world, building a comprehensive guide to the full range of Internet based resources in any field requires extremely strong resource discovery skills.

In identifying and locating the resources used in building the Medical Radiography Home Page I have developed a thorough understanding of the scope, structure, and tools for accessing bibliographic databases, knowledge bases, medical image databases, virtual libraries, electronic journals and archives, newsgroups, e mail listservers, gopher servers, ftp servers, WWW servers, and WAIS indexes of interest to radiologic science professionals, In order to complete this project it was necessary to develop skill using a variety of access tools and search engines, formulating queries, and designing effective search strategies.

Information Appraisal

Validating the Internet based resources included in the Medical Radiography Home Page requires strong skills for the critical evaluation of information. The dynamic nature of Internet in general and the WorldWide Web in particular means that validation must be a continuous process. The validation process involves looking at the source of a particular resource as well as assessing the content of individual resources based on domain knowledge and relevance.

In an era when there is a proliferation of tools capable of performing full-text searches of billions of words in tens of millions of documents it is not uncommon for a search for a particular topic to yield more than ten thousand documents. This potential for information overload has required that I develop the selectivity necessary to prevent or to cope with it.

Information Management

Developing the Medical Radiography Home Page has involved the creation and management of several versions of the more than one hundred separate HTML documents mirrored on four separate file servers which make up the Web site. It has also required the creation and management of of a database of several thousand Uniform Resource Locators (URL) for radiologic science, health science, and education resources. In order to effectively manage this web site and the associated database I have needed to develop a thorough understanding of the principles of information management and to apply those principles to this project.

Information Dissemination

The challenge for information providers is to best define--according to the needs of their users--the content and presentation methods that define quality information so that their webs can meet user needs." [December, 1994]
Meeting this challenge requires that information providers evaluate their offerings based on a clearly defined set of criteria. For the purposes of this project I chose to evaluate the information I am providing based on the five areas identified by Wright: adequacy of the content and the interface; acceptability to readers; adaptability by readers for the task in hand; skills of the readers as information users; and costs of production and dissemination. [Wright, 1991] In order to carry out this evaluation and to act upon the findings it was necessary to understand the information using behaviors of information users, providers, and developers.

The use of hypertext to dynamically link information requires the information provider to make certain decisions about how users will be allowed to navigate through conceptual space in an effort to limit cognitive overhead and disorientation.

HTML Authoring and Web Site Implementation

The Medical Radiography Home Page was authored using the proposed standard for HTML 2.0, as well as portions of the Internet draft for tables in HTML 3.0, and selected Netscape extensions to HTML. This site is designed to take advantage of several extensions to HTML which enhance the usability or aesthetic value of the site while maintaining backwards compatability with HTML 2.0.

The Medical Radiography Home Page was developed, implemented, and tested using a variety of software tools. This has allowed me to become a skilled user of HTML Web Weaver 2.5.2 [Best Enterprises], HTML Edit 1.0 [Giles, 1995], BB Edit Lite [Bare Bones Software, Inc.], Adobe PageMill 1.0. [Adobe Systems, Inc.], Adobe Photoshop 2.5 [Adobe Systems, Inc.], GrapicsConvertor 2.1.2 (US). [Lemke Software], Fetch 3.0b6 [Dartmouth College], Netscape Navigator 1.1N for Macintosh and for Windows as well as Netscape Navigator 2.0 for Macintosh [Netscape Communications, Inc.], NCSA Mosaic 2.0b9 [National Center for Supercomputing Applications], MacWeb 0.9 [TraedeWave], and the AOL Web Browser 1.0 for Macintosh. [America Online, Inc.]

Assessing the Value of the Medical Radiography Home Page As

An Information Resource

The Value of Information

Information has no inherent value. Instead, it derives its value from the ways in which it is used. There is little value in an information resource if it remains unknown or is underutilized by potential users. Success for an information provider depends not only on attracting new users but on having them become regular users. Publicity and curiosity may bring users in for a look around however it is a combination of content, presentation, aesthetics, and reliability which keep users coming back.

Peer Evaluation of Content and Aesthetics

Although the Medical Radiography Home Page has not undergone a formal peer review process, it is continuously undergoing an informal peer review process. The Medical Radiography Home Page has been publicized on the appropriate Usenet newsgroups and e mail listservers as well as at various professional meetings. I have always actively encouraged feedback as part of the publicity process. I also have built a network of colleagues who have provided me with support, encouragement, insight, editorial advice, and suggestions. User feedback is the primary factor I use in evaluating performance as well as being the major tool I have used to improve the value of the site as an information resource.

Reliability

The WorldWide Web offers users the promise of access to information on demand, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Reliability plays a major role when users choose between multiple sources for the same information. Early in the development of the Medical Radiography Home Page I discovered the value of mirroring web sites on multiple servers to insure accessibility. After several early server crashes on America Online, I duplicated the entire site on WorldNET as well as making the site available by ftp for use as local pages on individual users' computers or local area networks. While there continue to be occasional periods when each server is unavailable due to network, software, or hardware failures, the overall reliability of each server has been good and has been steadily improving. Since bringing the WorldNET site online, the Medical Radiography Home Page has been accessible on at least one server virtually 100% of the time.

Patterns of Use

An analysis of the usage patterns for the Medical Radiography Home Page reveals a statisticly significant trend toward an increase in the number of users. Individual user accesses were plotted over the sixty-four consecutive days for which usage information was available. A linear regession was performed resulting in a Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient of 0.54 (p<0.001). Although a correlation coefficient of 0.54 represents a relatively weak correlation, the value of p was so far below 0.001 (p=3 X 10-6) that the only credible hypothesis that comes to mind is that daily fluctuations in usage based on holidays, school vacations, server problems or unidentified factors, individually or in combination, may have masked the strength of the correlation. To test this hypothesis, weekly usage figures were calculated to determine the average number of daily users and for each of the eight full weeks for which usage statistics were available. A linear regression was performed resulting in a strongly significant correlation coefficient of 0.90 (p=0.001). This suggests that the observed trend is real.

Discipline Specific Resources Used To Compile the Medical Radiography Home Page

alt.medical.image [Usenet]

CIC HealthWeb:Radiology (Indiana University) [WWW] http://www.medlib.iupui.edu/cicnet/rad/radnetho.html

EiNet - Radiology [WWW]
http://galaxy.einet.net/galaxy/Medicine/Medical-Specialties/Radiology.html

Karolinska Institute MIC-KIBIC MeSH Index - Biophysics, Spectroscopy & Radiology [WWW] http://www.mic.ki.se/Biophys.html

Magnetic Resonance Sites Worldwide (Jonathan Callahan, Univ Washington) [WWW] http://strange.engr.washington.edu/laboratories.html

MAG-NET - NMR Internet Resource Guide (William A. Daunch, Univ Akron) [WWW] http://atlas.chemistry.uakron.edu:8080/cdept.docs/nmrsites2.html

Martindale's Health Science Guide - Medical Imaging Center [WWW] http://www-sci.lib.uci.edu/HSG/MedicalImage.html#MIC

Medical Imaging Internet Resources (Nick Efford, Centre of Medical Imaging Research, Univ Leeds, U.K.) [WWW] http://agora.leeds.ac.uk/comir/resources/links_c.html

Medical Matrix - Radiology [WWW] http://www.kumc.edu:80/mmatrix/SPECIALT/RADIOLOG.HTML

Med Nexus - Radiology [WWW] http://www.mednexus.com/public/mnlinkrd.html

MedWeb: Radiology and Imaging [WWW] http://www.cc.emory.edu/WHSCL/medweb.radiology.html

Penn State Radiology [WWW] http://www.xray.hmc.psu.edu/

Penn State Teaching files [WWW] http://www.xray.hmc.psu.edu/public/tf.html

Radsci-l [Listserver]

RSNA LAUNCH PAD: On-Line Sources of Information [WWW] http://www.rsna.org/edu/internet/launchpad.html

sci.med.informatics [Usenet]

sci.med.radiology [Usenet]

sci.med.telemedicine [Usenet]

University of Michigan Radiology Teaching Guide [WWW] http://www.rad.med.umich.edu/Guide/

Yahoo:Health:Medicine:Medical Imaging [WWW] http://www.yahoo.com/Health/Medicine/Medical_Imaging/

Yahoo:Health:Medicine:Radiology [WWW] http://www.yahoo.com/Health/Medicine/Radiology/

General Resources Used To Compile the Medical Radiography Home Page

All-in-One Internet Search [WWW] http://www.albany.net/~wcross/all1srch.html

Alta Vista: Advanced Query [WWW]
http://www.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg%3Daq%26what%3Dweb

Alta Vista Simple Query [WWW] http://www.altavista.digital.com/

An Index of FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) [WWW] http://www.intac.com/FAQ.html

Cisco Educational Archives CEARCH engine! [WWW]
http://sunsite.unc.edu/cisco/edu-arch.html

The Clearinghouse for Subject Oriented Internet Resources (U Michigan) [WWW] http://www.lib.umich.edu/chhome.html

DejaNews Research Service [WWW] http://www.dejanews.com/forms/dnquery.html

Hardin Directory of health sciences Internet sources [WWW] http://www.arcade.uiowa.edu/hardin-www/subj.html

Hardin Meta Directory of Internet Health Sources [WWW] http://www.arcade.uiowa.edu/hardin-www/md.html

Hardin Meta Directory - Radiology [WWW] http://www.arcade.uiowa.edu/hardin-www/md-rad.html

Harvest Broker [WWW]
http://rd.cs.colorado.edu/brokers/www-home-pages/query.html

Internet Meta-Index [WWW] http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/MetaIndex.html

InterLinks - Searching the Net [WWW] http://www.cam.org/~intsci/

International Network for Interfaith Health Practices [WWW] http://www.interaccess.com/ihpnet/health.html

Internet Resources Meta-Index [WWW] http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/MetaIndex.html

The Internet Sleuth [WWW] http://www.intbc.com/sleuth/

Internet White Pages [WWW] http://home.mcom.com/home/internet-white-pages.html

InterNIC Directory of Directories (AT&T/NSF) [WWW] http://ds.internic.net/cgi-bin/wais.pl/dirofdirs

List of Robots [WWW] http://web.nexor.co.uk/mak/doc/robots/active.html

The Lycos Home Page: Hunting WWW Information [WWW] http://lycos.cs.cmu.edu/

Medical Imaging Center - Martindale's Health Science Guide [WWW] http://www-sci.lib.uci.edu/HSG/MedicalImage.html#MIC

MetaCrawler Searching [WWW] http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/ai/metacrawler/www/

NIKOS Web Search [WWW] http://www.rns.com/cgi-bin/nomad

New Riders' Official World Wide Web Yellow Pages [WWW] http://www.mcp.com/nrp/wwwyp/

Physics Around the World: Search for Physics and Other Information [WWW] http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/physics-services/physics_search.html

Scott Yanoff's List of Special Internet Connections [WWW] http://www.uwm.edu/Mirror/inet.services.html

Searching the Web [WWW] http://www.yahoo.com/Reference/Searching_the_Web/

Starting Point [WWW] http://www.stpt.com/

W3 Search Engines from McGill University [WWW] http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/physics-services/meta-search.html

Wandex, the World Wide Web Wanderer Index [WWW] http://www.netgen.com/cgi/wandex

Web Central [WWW] http://www.tiac.net/users/thorgan/home.html

WebCrawler (AOL) [WWW] http://webcrawler.com/

Webdex, The Ultimate Web Index [WWW] http://linus.cs.ohiou.edu/~mwavle/webdex/

The Whole Internet Catalog [WWW] http://nearnet.gnn.com/wic/newrescat.toc.html

The World-Wide Web Virtual Library: Subject Catalogue [WWW] http://www.w3.org/hypertext/DataSources/bySubject/Overview.html

World Wide Web Worm [WWW] http://www.cs.colorado.edu/home/mcbryan/WWWW.html

World Wide Web Robots, Wanderers, and Spiders [WWW] http://web.nexor.co.uk/users/mak/doc/robots/robots.html

World-Wide Web Servers: Summary [WWW] http://www.w3.org/hypertext/DataSources/WWW/Servers.html

The WWW Virtual Library [WWW] http://www.w3.org/hypertext/DataSources/bySubject/Overview.html

Yahoo [WWW] http://www.yahoo.com

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