Informatics Training for CDC Public Health Advisors
Finding What You Need on the World Wide Web
Instructor: Patrick O’Carroll, MD, MPH
Teaching methods: Lecture & computer exercise
Topics to be covered:
- Search strategies and options on the WWW: indexes, catalogues, topic lists
- Querying databases via the WWW
- Beyond the World Wide Web: news groups, gophers, mail lists
- From Pull to Push: personal news feeds and "information assembly"
- Assessing the quality and validity of what you find
- The status quo: Terabytes of content, kilobytes of information
Learning objectives:
By the end of this session, students will be able to:
- Describe a general strategy for finding authoritative public health information quickly on the WWW;
- Conduct both complex and simple searches use any of several common on-line search engines;
- Submit requests for numerical data using Web-based forms;
- View and subscribe to Usenet newsgroups;
- Assess the validity, quality, and authoritativeness of material found on the WWW using traditional guides to judgment as well as Web-specific techniques;
- Describe recent trends toward push (or smart-pull) technologies, and explain the advanatges of this new approach to information assembly.
- Discuss the relative merits of the body of library-based (physical) publications vs. materials on the World Wide Web.
Handouts:
- A sampling of public health-related World Wide Web sites.
References & suggested readings
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