Assessing the health information needs of the emergency preparedness nd management community

摘要

Thirty four professionals who are part of a community of practice in the field of health related emergency responsemanagement provided information about the sources of information that they currently use the most, as well as their unmetinformation needs, and the kinds of information systems tools they would like to have. This professional community reliesheavily on the Web, but they report severe information overload, in terms of not easily being able to find the kinds of informationthey want, amid the deluge of information that is there. In particular, they would find a system that uses social tagging andsocial recommender system features to be very useful for accessing relevant documents in the "gray literature". We suggest thatservices such as these will be increasingly important for professional communities in general.