Enriching online access to health information for the public: Efforts from a medical library in China

Purpose: Disseminating medical and health information is a mission of a public medical library. This paper describes a practice of a medical library in providing online access to health information for the general public.Design/methodology/approach: A four-step workflow is developed to integrate and disseminate heterogeneous health information from medical associations. First, a raw data repository is developed to manage the original submissions from information providers.Second, each document in the raw data repository is represented in a standardized XML schema. Third, the medical terms are identified and manually annotated, enriching the semantics of health information. Lastly, all the semantically enriched XML documents are converted to HTMLs for online dissemination.Findings: A health information website, CHealth, was developed for Chinese speakers. It provides free online access for all without any login or IP constrains. CHealth is available at www.chealth.org.cn.Research limitations: The current workflow is time-consuming and labor-intensive due to the lack of information submission/exchange standard and commonly agreed-on consumer health terminology in Chinese.Originality/value: In this work, the target audience of the medical library has been extended from traditional academic/professional to the general public. Methodologies in library sciences have been combined with those in consumer health informatics in CHealth development.