A digital library for health sciences educators: the Health Education Assets Library (HEAL)

Health sciences educators have the need but often have neither the time nor the resources to create and index digital multimedia materials suitable for use in educational settings. The primary mission of the Health Education Assets Library (HEAL) is to provide free digital content of the highest quality that meets the needs of today's health sciences educators and learners. HEAL promotes the preservation and exchange of content while respecting ownership and privacy. The project team is working with other organizations to establish an international network of distributed databases containing high-quality teaching resources in a variety of health sciences-related subject areas. Health sciences faculty may contribute multimedia materials to the database through the Web-based contributor interface. Libraries and institutional partners may contribute collections to the database using the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol for metadata harvesting or via Web services.