An indexing standard for sharing health education multimedia resources: the health education assets library (HEAL) metadata schema

Health sciences educators are increasingly incorporating multimedia (including images, animations, and videos) into educational materials such as PowerPoint lectures, Web sites, and interactive quizzes and cases. Educators continue to "reinvent the wheel" and develop costly duplicates of multimedia resources, despite new opportunities offered by the Internet to share resources. The Health Education Assets Library (HEAL) is designed to provide health sciences educators with freely available, high quality multimedia materials to augment health sciences education. We describe an XML schema that we created to index the health sciences multimedia resources in HEAL. The metadata schema provides a common mechanism by which remotely located distributed systems may share metadata records, allowing the end user to search many collections through one interface.