In 1999, The University of Arizona Health Sciences Library (AHSL) internally funded a project to reach out to public health professionals in two of Arizona?s counties - Pima County and Cochise County. The purpose of the project was to understand the information-seeking behaviors of public health professionals, to identify their information needs, and to begin to develop an infrastructure to satisfy those needs. AHSL is Arizona?s largest and most comprehensive health sciences library, providing access to current biomedical information for students and faculty of the University of Arizona (UA), and to health care providers and consumers statewide. Although AHSL has been very successful in providing services to traditional health professionals such as physicians and nurses around the state, public health professionals have never been a major component of AHSL?s user base. As a result of AHSL?s 6-month project, it became apparent that although public health nurses in Pima County have a great need for information, that need was not being adequately met. Furthermore the project demonstrated the lack of Internet connectivity within the Pima County Health Department (PCHD): 50 percent of the public health officials did not have access to the Internet and public health nurses made up 40 percent of that group. Therefore, AHSL proposes to enhance the information seeking capability of public health nurses in Pima County, by developing an infrastructure for the delivery of knowledge-based health information to support health care practice and by introducing, encouraging, and supporting widespread use of electronic information management tools.
