The Internet has become a major medium for geriatric health care education and a resource for the care or the older patient. Personal digital assistants (PDA) are also becoming popular educational and professional resources. Quality and accessibility are the main limitations for the Internet use in these areas. The division of Geriatrics at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine (USC-SOM) provides education and faculty development at the various educational and clinical sites of the university.
The aims of this proposal are to create an easily accessible digital library of high quality geriatric web materials and personal digital assistant (PDA) Internet resources that are reviewed by librarians and geriatricians and to increase the usage of this library in the clinical care of the older patient and in geriatric medical education. The digital library will be developed through a collaborative effort between the division of geriatrics and the USC-SOM library. Geriatric Internet materials and PDA Internet resources will be identified by a resource librarian and reviewed by geriatricians. The review process includes a quality scoring using a developed assessment tool (Geriatric Online Assessment Tool), a categorization method using a specific geriatric taxonomy based on the National Library of Medicine Medical Subject Headings thesaurus, and an audience and source attribute which designates the appropriate educational level and author of the resource. A system librarian will post these resources along with the category, quality score, and other attributes on the Internet digital library. This library can be queried by each attribute. For each category of the geriatric taxonomy, an embedded search of Pubmed will be created and information on how to obtain these documents using Loansome Doc through the USC.SOM library will be provided. The digital library will be promoted and used in the geriatric education at the multiple sites, including three rural multidisciplinary health education training sites of USC-SOM, and it will be promoted at local and regional scientific meetings, including the yearly continuing medical education meeting held by the geriatric division. Printed materials will also be mailed out to South Carolina Medical Association members. Face-to-Face and Web-based training will be provided. The USC-SOM library and geriatric division will maintain the library beyond the funding period.
| Hajjar, Ihab; Gable, Sarah A; Jenkinson, Victor P et al. (2005) Quality of Internet geriatric health information: the GeriatricWeb project. J Am Geriatr Soc 53:885-90 |
