Over the past five years, the Specialized Information Services Division of the National Library of Medicine has developed a set of Microcomputer- Based tutorials for selected MEDLARS databases. The set includes CHEMLEARN (for CHEMLINE/ChemID), TOXLEARN (for TOXLINE/TOXLIT), MEDTUTOR (for MEDLINE), and ELHILL LEARN (for the ELHILL search and retrieval programs). The tutorials are designed to teach librarians and information specialists, as well as scientists, how to search the respective databases effectively. The tutorials were developed under PILOTplus using the NLM LEARN Programmer. They require 512K RAM memory, one disk drive, and DOS 2.0 or higher. They support most monochrome, color graphics, inhanced color graphics, or visual graphics displays. The purpose of this project is to acquire the necessary programming and related services to provide annual updates to these tutorials to reflect changes to the databases, the MeSH vocabulary, and the ELHILL search and retrieval programs over the next three years. This project will also allow for repackaging these tutorials to run under a WINDOWS/MAC environment. The authoring language will be Toolbook by Asymetrix. The repackaged tutorials will be redesigned to take advantage of current developments in instructional design theory, including the availability of graphical user interfaces and will contain minidatabases to provide more realistic simulations. In addition, if technology advances to the point that it is possible to simulate a graphical user interface running under DOS, the DOS PILOTplus versions will be repackaged under a new authoring language.
