The National Library of Medicine's strategy for assessing the impacts of health information Web Sites

摘要

A central purpose of the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) is to collect, organized, and disseminate the best available biomedical and health information from the refereed scientific literature and authoritative biomedical and health organizations in the U.S. and worldwide. For most of its existence, NLM concentrated primarily on meeting the information needs of health practitioners, researchers, and librarians. Over the last five years, NLM's mission has expanded to included the general public, and especially patients, families and friends of patients, students, and the general health consumer. The increased reach of the NLM mission has in turn intensified the need to better understand and assess the impacts of NLM's health information dissemination programs and related outreach activities.