Understanding the information needs of public health practitioners: A literature review to inform design of an interactive digital knowledge management system

AbstractThe need for rapid access to information to support critical decisions in public health cannot be disputed; however, development of such systems requires an understanding of the actual information needs of public health professionals. This paper reports the results of a literature review focused on the information needs of public health professionals. The authors reviewed the public health literature to answer the following questions: (1) What are the information needs of public health professionals? (2) In what ways are those needs being met? (3) What are the barriers to meeting those needs? (4) What is the role of the Internet in meeting information needs? The review was undertaken in order to develop system requirements to inform the design and development of an interactive digital knowledge management system. The goal of the system is to support the collection, management, and retrieval of public health documents, data, learning objects, and tools.Method:The search method extended beyond traditional information resources, such as bibliographic databases, tables of contents (TOC), and bibliographies, to include information resources public health practitioners routinely use or have need to use—for example, grey literature, government reports, Internet-based publications, and meeting abstracts.Results:Although few formal studies of information needs and information-seeking behaviors of public health professionals have been reported, the literature consistently indicated a critical need for comprehensive, coordinated, and accessible information to meet the needs of the public health workforce. Major barriers to information access include time, resource reliability, trustworthiness/credibility of information, and “information overload”.Conclusions:Utilizing a novel search method that included the diversity of information resources public health practitioners use, has produced a richer and more useful picture of the information needs of the public health workforce than other literature reviews. There is a critical need for public health digital knowledge management systems designed to reflect the diversity of public health activities, to enable human communications, and to provide multiple access points to critical information resources. Public health librarians and other information specialists can serve a significant role in helping public health professionals meet their information needs through the development of evidence-based decision support systems, human-mediated expert searching and training in the use information retrieval systems

Secondary Metabolites of Marine Microbes: From Natural Products Chemistry to Chemical Ecology

Marine natural products (MNPs) exhibit a wide range of pharmaceutically relevant bioactivities, including antibiotic, antiviral, anticancer, or anti-inflammatory properties. Besides marine macroorganisms such as sponges, algae, or corals, specifically marine bacteria and fungi have shown to produce novel secondary metabolites (SMs) with unique and diverse chemical structures that may hold the key for the development of novel drugs or drug leads. Apart from highlighting their potential benefit to humankind, this review is focusing on the manifold functions of SMs in the marine ecosystem. For example, potent MNPs have the ability to exile predators and competing organisms, act as attractants for mating purposes, or serve as dye for the expulsion or attraction of other organisms. A large compilation of literature on the role of MNPs in marine ecology is available, and several reviews evaluated the function of MNPs for the aforementioned topics. Therefore, we focused the second part of this review on the importance of bioactive compounds from crustose coralline algae (CCA) and their role during coral settlement, a topic that has received less attention. It has been shown that certain SMs derived from CCA and their associated bacteria are able to induce attachment and/or metamorphosis of many benthic invertebrate larvae, including globally threatened reef-building scleractinian corals. This review provides an overview on bioactivities of MNPs from marine microbes and their potential use in medicine as well as on the latest findings of the chemical ecology and settlement process of scleractinian corals and other invertebrate larvae

A Public Health Knowledge Management Repository that Includes Grey Literature

Problem: Public health professionals rely heavily on resources that are often only available in grey literature format. However, while grey literature may contain comprehensive, concrete, and up-to-date information, the fugitive nature of this material makes access problematic. The public health community needs a knowledge management repository of grey literature and tools for easy and rapid access, so time spent searching across and through materials can be reduced. Goal: Design a customizable prototype public health knowledge management repository system and end-user interface with optimal interoperability and the capability to provide timely access to public health information in support of decision making at the point and time of need. Specification of an appropriate metadata schema, which identifies in a standardized way the elements needed to describe a resource, are a critical part of the system. The long-term goal is a system that delivers answers to public health questions, not a list of pointers to resources that may or may not contain information to answer those questions Evaluation Procedure: We are utilizing user needs analysis, user profiling, and resource assessment to inform understanding the information needs of public health professionals in the context of their everyday workflow and enable identification of key grey literature knowledge resources for incorporation into the knowledge management system. Rapid prototyping is being used to translate these findings into system specifications and interface design of a small-scale prototype system. The prototype defines system components and interactivity both among components and with relevant external knowledge resources—for example, the New York Academy of Medicine's Grey Literature collection, web resources from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Health materials, etc. The collection of materials will be organized utilizing resource metadata (high level formal, standards-based descriptions of documents) to improve location of relevant grey literature and other information sources. Results: Testing and evaluation will result in enhancements to the user interface, information resources, presentation of those resources, etc. We also anticipate that the metadata schema employed in a public health knowledge management system will improve the efficacy and efficiency of locating answers to public health questions from the grey literature. Conclusions: As the amount and breadth of public health information resources continue to expand it is critical that we find ways to provide direct access to the contents of these rich and complex resources. We believe that a public health grey literature knowledge management system with a collection of resources driven by the information needs of public health practitioners and organized using an appropriate metadata scheme will reduce time spent searching across and through materials, enhance public health decision making and ultimately improve the overall quality of public health services.Includes: Conference preprint, Powerpoint presentation, Abstract and Biographical notes, Pratt student commentaryXAInternationa

Abstract An Information Extraction and Representation System for Rapid Review of the Biomedical Literature

With the rapid expansion of scientific research, the ability to effectively find or integrate new domain knowledge in the sciences is proving increasingly difficult. The development of methods and tools for assisting researchers to effectively extract problem-oriented knowledge from heterogeneous and massive information sources, and for using this knowledge in problem-solving is one of the most fundamental research directions for the information and computer sciences today. There is a need for new tools to support more precise identification of relevant research articles and provide visual clues regarding relationships among the document sets. We present the Telemakus system in which aggregated citation information and extracted research findings are displayed in a schema-based document surrogate and an interactive mapping tool provides graphical displays of research interrelationships from documents across a domain. This system is an innovative approach to creating useful and precise document surrogates and may re-conceptualize the way we currently represent, retrieve, and assimilate research findings from the published literature. Keywords

Understanding the information needs of public health practitioners: A literature review to inform design of an interactive digital knowledge management system

AbstractThe need for rapid access to information to support critical decisions in public health cannot be disputed; however, development of such systems requires an understanding of the actual information needs of public health professionals. This paper reports the results of a literature review focused on the information needs of public health professionals. The authors reviewed the public health literature to answer the following questions: (1) What are the information needs of public health professionals? (2) In what ways are those needs being met? (3) What are the barriers to meeting those needs? (4) What is the role of the Internet in meeting information needs? The review was undertaken in order to develop system requirements to inform the design and development of an interactive digital knowledge management system. The goal of the system is to support the collection, management, and retrieval of public health documents, data, learning objects, and tools.Method:The search method extended beyond traditional information resources, such as bibliographic databases, tables of contents (TOC), and bibliographies, to include information resources public health practitioners routinely use or have need to use—for example, grey literature, government reports, Internet-based publications, and meeting abstracts.Results:Although few formal studies of information needs and information-seeking behaviors of public health professionals have been reported, the literature consistently indicated a critical need for comprehensive, coordinated, and accessible information to meet the needs of the public health workforce. Major barriers to information access include time, resource reliability, trustworthiness/credibility of information, and “information overload”.Conclusions:Utilizing a novel search method that included the diversity of information resources public health practitioners use, has produced a richer and more useful picture of the information needs of the public health workforce than other literature reviews. There is a critical need for public health digital knowledge management systems designed to reflect the diversity of public health activities, to enable human communications, and to provide multiple access points to critical information resources. Public health librarians and other information specialists can serve a significant role in helping public health professionals meet their information needs through the development of evidence-based decision support systems, human-mediated expert searching and training in the use information retrieval systems

Technical Description of the Distribute Project: A Community-based Syndromic Surveillance System Implementation

This paper describes the design of a syndromic surveillance system implemented for community-based monitoring of influenza-like illness. The system began as a collaboration between colleagues from state and large metropolitan area health jurisdictions, academic institutions, and the non-profit, International Society for Disease Surveillance. Over the six influenza seasons from 2006 to 2012, the system was automated and enhanced, with new features and infrastructure, and the resulting, reliable, enterprise grade system supported peer comparisons between 44 state and local public health jurisdictions who voluntarily contributed summarized data on influenza-like illness and gastrointestinal syndromes. The system was unusual in that it addressed the needs of a widely distributed, voluntary, community engaged in real-time data integration to support operational public health.Keywords: syndromic surveillance, secondary use of health data, Internet, public health standards, surveillance practic