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Medical School Database Connects Classroom to Clinic
6/28/2001
Susan Albright, director of the HSDB, was one of the original team members. "This has been a labor of love," she says. Albright has been with the project from the beginning, when they were "talking about using Gopher and Mosaic to access the World Wide Web." Currently, the HSDB offers resources for students studying medicine, veterinary science, dentistry, public health, biomedical science, and nutrition. Albright and her team are focusing now on building out the database to include all of the material they can get from many other Health Sciences programs at Tufts. When that's done, the HSDB will offer truly cross-curricular material. The decision to make the database available to other health-related schools is a unique example of a medical school reaching out to its colleagues in parallel professional programs. Students will be able to access material from any of the programs and can search in such a way that they either sift out other programs' material or include it. For instance, a veterinary student might search for information on rabies that includes not only material on the care and treatment of animals, but also on the human impact of rabies, material that may be donated by the medical school or school of public health.
Albright's team is also adding features to the database that will allow faculty members to edit, search, and add material on an as-needed basis, giving instructors more ownership of the tool and providing a shortcut for putting new information onto the database more quickly.
The HSDB is built using MySQL, an open-source SQL relational database, and is housed in a Unix server. The fiber-optic, gigabit-ethernet, high-speed network at Tufts, powered by equipment from Foundry Networks, connects all three University campuses. The network provides significantly advanced data transmission rates enabling easy, quick access to the HSDB from all locations. Other applications supported by the HSDB include Macromedia Dreamweaver, Shockwave, and Director; Adobe Illustrator and Premier; PhotoShop; and RealNetworks. The modular, building-block nature of the database gives the administrators the confidence to open up the tool to every faculty member. Of course, Albright and the others on the team will continue to help faculty as much as necessary, both with the basics and with designing new teaching tools. These have included an interactive radiology teaching tool that uses RealServer and Flash, interactive quizzes, and digitized lectures that feature synchronized audio and slides.
For more information, contact Susan Albright, susan.albright@tufts.edu.
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