As more courses go digital, and access to increased bandwidth makes the delivery of multimedia more practical, faculty members are creating and collecting media resources (images, sounds, video) to support their teaching activities. The ability to retrieve, reuse, and share these educational resources enhances their value, but it doesn't take long for individual collections to grow unmanageable. Unlike paper-based resources (lecture notes, books, journals), media objects can't be viewed with the naked eye or easily "filed" or "shelved".
A database approach to managing media resources makes the most sense, but for an individual faculty member (or even an individual institution) the cost and expertise required may be prohibitive.
Help is on the way. The Health Education Assets Library, or HEAL, is a project funded by the National Science Foundation, in collaboration with National Library of Medicine, to plan for and implement a national repository of shared media resources to support the development of educational programs in the health sciences. The goal is to develop a centralized user interface and database system for collecting, managing and retrieving "high-quality health educational materials" and to facilitate the sharing of these materials among educators through a web portal at the NLM site.
In addition to building and supporting a technical infrastructure, HEAL will address intellectual property issues, promote data standards and quality assurance, and develop recommendations for incorporating multimedia into learning materials. HEAL also intends to pursue long term funding and support for the project
Existing multimedia databases, UCLA School of Medicine's UMed Search and the University of Utah's Knowledge Weavers, will help to form the initial HEAL database, and the project is seeking additional institutional partners as well as individual contributors.
The plan is to implement a prototype database and portal by Spring 2002. For more information on the mission and vision of the Health Education Assets Library, and on the progress of the project, visit the HEAL web site at: http://www.healcentral.org/.
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