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We had created a system that would allow our patrons to do multiple searches, click directly through to a provider, and download a full-text article in the time that the old system would have still been waiting for the initial search to complete.
The Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, located on the National Naval Medical Center's campus in Bethesda, Md., is a medical education and research facility for the nation's military and public health community. In order to support our approximately 7,500 globally distributed users, the university's James A. Zimble Learning Resource Center provides Web-based access to more than 8,000 electronic resources through one of the first electronic library portals that was ever on the Internet. But after 9 years of service, our portal "patient" was starting to show its age.
We provide the IT development and support for the various systems within our library. Stephen Brown, project architect and director of our group, and Stephan Spitzer, lead developer and database administrator, worked with our development team of two others to revitalize this application suite. While we made many innovations and improvements to our system, our discussion will focus on the performance enhancements that used open source software and various programming techniques.
A Physical Exam Begins With the Patient's History
First deployed in 1997, Remote Computer Services (RCS) was a Web-based collection of electronic library resources, including full-text journals and books, indexes to the published literature, medical databases, and other medical education resources. (See Figure 1.) Given that our user population worked under less-than-optimal network conditions (sometimes in combat situations), we designed RCS to function under low-bandwidth constraints. It offered a single sign-on for seamless access to all resources. Because our patrons were largely unfamiliar with the Web in 1997, we provided extensive help and guidance for all of our eclectic resources and eventually made inroads with linking full text to search engines.
Our formula was successful. With proper protections in place for our publishers, RCS began to function as a consortium tool, modularizing and providing custom interfaces to a number of related medical and research institutions, even outside of the Department of Defense. At its peak, RCS had amassed more than 8,000 registered users in all areas of health and medicine.