Introduction Antimicrobial resistance is a global problem with serious implications for modern medicine. Education of the public is essential for reducing patient pressure on GPs and subsequent inappropriate prescribing. Evaluation of educational interventions is necessary to assess their impact on public knowledge and attitudes. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of a health information website, part of the National electronic Library of Infection, on user knowledge and attitudes. Method Questionnaires testing user knowledge and attitudes before and after using the website. Results There were significant improvements in knowledge about the use of antibiotics and antibiotic resistance. Expectations that antibiotics should be prescribed were significantly reduced after using the website. Health professionals showed a significantly greater knowledge about antibiotics and were less likely to expect antibiotics to be prescribed for acute otitis media than non-health professionals before using the website. There was no significant difference between the knowledge of these groups after using the website, but non-health professionals continued to have higher expectations of antibiotics being prescribed than health professionals. Conclusions Health information websites can play a significant role in influencing public knowledge and attitudes. Further research is needed to investigate how people learn from these interventions and to determine their long-term impact on public attitudes and subsequent behaviour.
The National electronic Library of Infection (NeLI: http://www.neli.org.uk) in the UK is a freely available portal to key evidence and guidelines in the infectious disease field. This paper discusses 5 years of evaluation of the pilot library and how this evaluation informed design of the new library website. The importance of combining qualitative and quantitative evaluation is highlighted and the results of web access logs analysis, free text search query analysis and an online user survey are compared. The paper concludes with a discussion of lessons learned for future development and evaluation of this Internet digital library.
Modern healthcare specialists are overwhelmed with medical information available on the Internet. However, it is difficult to find a particular piece of information when and where they actually need it. The National electronic Library for Health (NeLH) is addressing this issue by providing a single-entry portal to evidence-based medical information on the Internet enhanced with a quality tag assigned by professional experts in the field. In order to fully utilize the potential of an Internet-based library, the NeLH is distributed and consists of a number of Virtual Branch Libraries (VBLs), each dedicated to a particular disease or a medical area. Our team is responsible for the development of the communicable disease branch of the NeLH, called NeLCD (National electronic Library for Communicable Disease). VBLs are dynamically updated and their design reflects the needs of each particular user base. However, users accessing a single VBL may want to search the entire NeLH or should have the option of being able to search the entire NeLH. Therefore, support for a distributed search according to an adopted topology of VBL servers is essential. Intelligent Interface Agents are essential for the development and runtime of the library as they perform autonomously a number of tasks related to the search, assist humans in information publishing, the document review process and data exchange and retrieval. In this paper, we present an agent-based solution to assist in distributed search across the NeLH, and customization and personalization in the NeLCD.
Evaluation on Internet portals is a key component of any online resource development. Understanding user information seeking behaviour and user perceived behaviour is essential to obtain the full picture of user needs, online activities and draw lessons to improve the design of Internet portals to better meet user expectations. This article discusses the evaluation of a WHO Internet portal: the Labresources website. The evaluation investigates user satisfaction with the resource, usability, demographic information about users and how well they could complete specific tasks using the website and compared this with the actual online behaviour revealing a number of discrepancies. An online questionnaire was advertised on the Labresources website during the period 25 November 2005 to 20 February 2006. As the site caters to English and French speakers, the questionnaire was made available in both languages. It consisted of two sections - the first section required the participant to complete three tasks using the website whereas the second section tested user satisfaction, information needs and appropriateness of the content. Weblogs data were compared with the questionnaire results to compare user perceived and actual online behaviour. Twenty one respondents completed the online questionnaire from a total of 18 countries. This was out of a potential 60 website users among whom the questionnaire was promoted. In general, respondents were satisfied with the website layout and navigation. 61.9% of respondents listed WHO among their top 5 and a third listed the Labresources website. The number of sessions where users browse (146) the information resources is almost three times more than the number of users who search (52) the resources. Weblogs revealed most interesting results with differences between what users reported doing when completing tasks and how easy they perceived the tasks and what they actually did. Twelve respondents completed at least one task. Of the remaining nine respondents, three did visit the Labresources website from the link in the questionnaire but did not go on to complete the tasks. Only one of the twelve who completed a task reported it being difficult. Three of the respondents who didn't complete a task reported the tasks to be difficult but only one of these actually followed the link to begin the tasks in the questionnaire. This article described an evaluation study investigating user perceived and actual behaviour at the WHO Labresources Internet portal. Although the questionnaire results demonstrated general satisfaction with the resource, a combination of a weblog evaluation with the questionnaire revealed a clearer picture of the user perception of and satisfaction with the website compared to their actual activity when completing the set tasks.
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