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Harvesting the Internet: Creating a Resource on the Treatment of Skin
Disease Using the Deliberations of an E-mail Discussion Group, RxDerm-L.
Introduction
Arthur C Huntley MD
Department of Dermatology
University of California Davis
USA
achuntley@ucdavis.edu
Using Internet hypermedia tools for education offers new and unique opportunities and challenges for the
educator. To employ the advantageous aspects of the Internet involves developing and using new methods of
information gathering and presentation.. In both medical practice and medical education, the Internet provides
new opportunities for improvement in the access and transfer of information.
To understand and use the inherent advantages of networked computers, one can begin by their enumeration.
The potential advantages begin at information gathering and extend through presentation. They include:
immediacy, ease of collaboration, global sharing of resources, extended archiving of material, improved access,
interactive presentation, feedback, ability to offer more than one path through material, ease of revision, ability
to make extensive use of images, potentially low cost to viewer. Any improvement over paper resource will
probably arise from the use of these advantages.
Thus report involves the creation and subsequent harvesting of a dermatology e-mail group developed to
provide a source of discussion about therapy of skin disease. The result of this effort is a searchable on-line
archive of treatment discussion for skin disease. In order to determine the value of this resource, the
information generated was compared with that available from using Medline and from using DermRx (a
software program developed and marketed by the American Academy of Dermatology).
Methods:
RxDerm-L was created as an e-mail list at the University of California Davis in November 1993. With the list
description noting that discussion was intended for and by dermatologists. It was initially open for
subscription, but subsequent to a few intrusive requests, subscriptions are moderated. Posting is only open to
subscribers and comments are not moderated.
Beginning in June 1995, archiving of the list discussions was initiated, and the generated material filed by
disease. The letters are not edited except for occasional off-topic comments. The archives were first made
available by gopher, and subsequently on a WWW server http://matrix.ucdavis.edu).
(
For the purposes of evaluation, a list of 50 diseases was drawn at random from the index of a common
dermatology textbook. The output for each disease was then compared using RxDerm Archives, DermRx, and
Melvyl Medline. Comparisons were made about the number of treatment options elicited by each program for
each disease and the depth of the discussion. An attempt was made to estimate the quality of information and
any obvious deficits.
Results: