NCSU Libraries Focus Online

Volume 23 number 1 - Fall 2002

By Laura Osegueda, Joe Williams, and Plato Smith, Veterinary Medical Library

The NCSU Libraries, through its Veterinary Medical Library (VML), is supporting the College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM) Mobile Computing Initiative, which has supplied third- and fourth-year students and teaching faculty with wireless-enabled Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). At the beginning of the project in fall 2001, Joe Williams, an NCSU Libraries Fellow assigned to the project, initiated the library's support by creating a new PDA Resources Web page that provides library information in a format easily accessible by PDA. This Web page allows PDA users to search the Libraries' online catalog, submit questions to reference librarians, request books and articles through interlibrary loan, renew borrowed library materials, and more while connected wirelessly to the Internet. The Web page also serves as a resource tool for PDA owners in the college, providing links to relevant Web sites and user groups, software information, and PDA industry news.

In addition to creating and maintaining the PDA Resources Web page, VML staff members have organized a PDA Users Group open to all interested students and faculty. During the 2002 spring semester, the library offered informative lunchtime sessions to introduce basic functions and applications to new users. Outreach to the faculty continues to be an important goal for this fall semester. A new focus will be hardware reviews and tips for loading veterinary-related electronic books. Plato Smith, another library Fellow who has been assigned to the project since July 2002, brings a strong technical background in computer programming and support to the project. He works closely with faculty and students to recommend and support peripherals that expand and enhance use of the Handspring Visors (the model of PDA selected by the college) in classrooms and clinics. He also promotes other uses that integrate the PDAs into the learning and healing environment of the CVM. The library will be lending PDA versions of veterinary textbooks for students and faculty to preview before purchase and will also provide technical advise regarding best practices for managing these large resources within the limited memory of the PDAs.

Handspring Visors have a variety of useful software available for personal organization such as a date book, address book, and expense and to-do lists. Many useful medical databases are available using the HanDBase software provided by the collegewide license. Williams created a veterinary abbreviations database for the project by modifying an online database from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and it is now available as a HanDBase file. Another useful database available for clinical applications and used by the CVM is the locally produced "Drug Formulary" created by Mark Papich, a faculty member with the Department of Anatomy, Physiological Science, and Radiology at the CVM. The VML also produced a "HanDBase Clinical Log" for fourth-year students to track patient contacts through the various rotations.

Another interesting use of the PDAs is for interactive quizzing in the classroom using the "Instant Polling Application." The software, developed locally by the CVM's director of Web-based instruction Dan McWhorter, provides a quick means to test a concept, gather opinions, or administer an impromptu quiz online with instant results displayed graphically. More faculty began using this software when the second round of PDAs was distributed to the Class of 2004 at the beginning of the fall 2002 semester.

The VML's PDA Resources Web page can be viewed at http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/vetmed/pda/. Please visit the CVM Mobile Computing Initiative Web site for more information at http://www.cvm.ncsu.edu/mobilecomp/.