In the past decade, the rapid development of computer digital technologies combined with the growth of the Internet has revolutionized traditional methods of research. ATIS supports the Hopkins medical community in staying abreast of these technologies by undertaking its own research inititatives on in these areas.

Sharable UMLS-based archive system for faculty-developed digital resources

Recently, Welch Library was awarded a Translational Informatics Grant from the National Library of Medicine to develop a Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) enhanced digital repository system. Important components of the project include collaborative work with faculty and students at the Department of Cell Biology's Microscope Facility to develop a user model, a research study on UMLS and its indexing mechanism, and software development to create functions for storing, sharing, accessing and searching digital objects. Beginning July 1, 2005 , the project will run for a three year period.

User information-seeking behavior

The emergence of information portal systems in the past few years has led to a greatly enhanced Web-based environment for users seeking information online. While considerable research has been conducted on user information-seeking behavior in regular IR environments over the past decade, ATIS is focusing specifically on how users in a medical science and clinical setting carry out their daily information seeking through a customizable information portal system (MyWelch). In an article published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology titled User Information Seeking Behavior in a Medical Web Portal Environment: A Preliminary Study, we describe our initial study on analyzing Web usage data from MyWelch to see whether the results conform to the features and patterns established in current information-seeking models, present several observations regarding user information-seeking behavior in a portal environment, outline possible long-term user information-seeking patterns based on usage data, and discuss the direction of future research on user information-seeking behavior in the MyWelch portal environment.