At Baylor College of Medicine, we are developing the technical intellectual resources needed to realize the IAIMS concept fully. The necessary technical, organizational and financial commitments demand that we align our efforts with the strategic purposes of the College. The support of science, therefore, has become the principal, but not exclusive focus of Baylor's IAIMS development. While we have given priority to science in our IAIMS planning, research and development, the information technology architecture we have created for biomedical research is proving valuable in other settings as well. And the infrastructure we are creating - the communications architecture and the linkages to information resources - serves many purposes in addition to those of research. From the scenarios we created in Phase I, we developed the concept of the Virtual Note- book System. In Phase II, we created a prototype of that system and designed a comprehensive information technology architecture to support it. In Phase III, we propose to extend and enrich our IAIMS architecture, to deploy our Virtual Note-book System for information acquisition and sharing in a variety of scientific settings, to transfer our technology to educational and administrative applications, and to develop further our organizational structure to nurture IAIMS growth. We also propose to use the techniques of oral history in a novel approach to the assessment of the IAIMS experience. Our strategy, more than that of any other IAIMS institution, explicitly addresses technologic heterogeneity. Our information technology architecture accommodates a diversity of workstations, networks and informational and computational servers. This will give us the greatest chance of transferring the fruits of our Phase III development to other academic medical centers.
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