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Grant awarded to study health information metadata
Mar. 20, 2008—Jane Greenberg, Francis Carroll McColl Term Professor at the University of North Carolina's School of Information and Library Science (SILS), and SILS alumna Christie Silbajoris (MSLS '00, AHIP), director of NC Health Info at UNC's Health Sciences Library, have received a grant to study the automatic maintenance of health information metadata.
The grant, awarded by the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (Southeastern/Atlantic Region), is a collaboration involving the SILS Metadata Research Center and UNC at Chapel Hill's Health Sciences Library. The award supports the team's research on effective ways to automatically maintain metadata (or cataloging information) that describes resources made accessible via the NC Health Info Web site. NC Health Info provides North Carolina residents with guides to local health services as well as reputable health information.
"Having good quality metadata is crucial to NC Health Info for resource discovery and access to health information," said Greenberg. "For instance, metadata associated with a health center listed on NC Health Info contains information on the doctors' expertise. A new doctor who joins the center may have an area of expertise added to the Web site but that does not get accounted for in the metadata record. The study will look for ways to automatically update this metadata in a timely and efficient manner so NC Health Info can keep current and best serve the needs of North Carolina residents."
The project, dubbed "AMMGO (Automatic Metadata Maintenance for NC Health Info and Go Local)," consists of two phases. The first phase will identify what information on NC Health Info is a high priority for automatic metadata maintenance. The second phase will focus on testing selected automatic processing techniques and evaluating the site's metadata quality to determine the effectiveness of the automatic metadata maintenance process.
According to Greenberg, "incorporating automatic techniques into NC Health Info's metadata generation/quality control processes will allow catalogers to direct more time to the metadata challenges requiring human skill and intellect and ultimately provide better service to NC Health Info users."
Since NC Health Info is the first "MedlinePlus Go Local" site and serves as a model for 24 other Go Local projects, with others under development, the AMMGO project will have an effect beyond NC Health Info, Silbajoris said.
"The larger significance of this project is its ability to inform and guide the work of the other Go Locals by decreasing the staff time required to keep information accurate and enabling more time and attention to growing their databases, thereby increasing citizens' access to health information nationwide," Silbajoris said. "The 'Go Local' concept originated at UNC's Health Science Library in 1999. Jane collaborated with us to then to help create our vocabulary. It's been wonderful to work together again on this important project."
Both Greenberg and Silbajoris acknowledged and praised the fine work of two SILS graduate students, Wei Hsin Su and Jie Jin, who have joined them as researchers on the AMMGO project.