[Asis-l] Report available on Information Seeking Emergency Management professionals

[Murray Turoff]

Roxanne Hiltz and I have completed an inquiry type study of the
information seeking behavior and NEEDs of professionals in Emergency
Preparedness and Management with some emphasis on the medical and
public health area but also covering general concerns.  It is now
public.

This report to NLM (national library of medicine) based upon the
inputs from 34 experts with about 2/3 of them being actual
practitioners and the other 1/3 academics in the application area.
They are listed in the report except for three that wished to remain
anonymous.

The appendix contains the actual words used by the respondents on each
of the questions and is the most interesting part of the report to
skim and see the detailed comments.  It contains what the participants
considered the most useful sources of information and links are in the
report.  The chief result is that most professionals are facing
information overload.  But there are inferred potential solutions in
the expressed needs.

There is an executive summary up front of five pages.  .The report is
167 pages (appendix about 130 pages with some very valuable material
we (Roxanne Hiltz and I) felt would be of interest to both
practitioners and academics (about 1/3 of the respondents)

This report can now be freely distributed.  I have put an html version
and a PDF download on my website.  The table of contents in the html
version provides active links to sections of the report.

 http://is.njit.edu/turoff

Click on the title (for html version) about half way down the page, as
it is the first paper in the list of online papers.  This might be the
quickest way to skim and the table of content is linked to the
sections of the report.  The report, even in PDF, has active links to
the sites and material the respondents said where the most important
ones for their various activities.  So it might be valuable for others
you know.

If you know practitioners, the question on what other practitioners
consider the most valuable websites is really useful as well as a
great appendix on international site contributed by Hal Newman, the
chief volunteer editor of "big medicine" on the web for those in the
medical and public health area.

There will be a panel at the ISCRAM meeting in DC (iscram.org) on this
report with four of the participants (some known to this message list)
and one NLM representative.  In addition, ISCRAM has two sessions of
papers on what might be done to help mitigate the current information
overload situation that practitioners are facing.


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http://is.njit.edu/turoff