Information needs research in the era of the digital medical library.

The rapid adoption of Internet-accessible information resources by the clinical community, has resulted in an exponential growth in the variety and type of clinical information resources along with an increasing diversity of information technologies to deliver clinical information. To date, little formal work has been done to investigate the significance of new information technologies such as Internet-based digital libraries and multimedia record systems on clinical information need or information seeking behavior. In the work described in this paper, we highlight some results from our recent multimethod research design and investigation of the information-seeking behavior of Pittsburgh area medical oncologists to argue for the use of a multimethod research design as an essential component of any investigation of clinical information need and information-seeking behavior in the era of the digital medical library.

The World Wide Web: a review of an emerging internet-based technology for the distribution of biomedical information.

The Internet is rapidly evolving from a resource used primarily by the research community to a true global information network offering a wide range of databases and services. This evolution presents many opportunities for improved access to biomedical information, but Internet-based resources have often been difficult for the non-expert to develop and use. The World Wide Web (WWW) supports an inexpensive, easy-to-use, cross-platform, graphic interface to the Internet that may radically alter the way we retrieve and disseminate medical data. This paper summarizes the Internet and hypertext origins of the WWW, reviews WWW-specific technologies, and describes current and future applications of this technology in medicine and medical informatics. The paper also includes an appendix of useful biomedical WWW servers.