Migrating a Hospital Library Web Site to SharePoint and Expanding its Usefulness

Abstract

When a hospital system decides to change its intranet platform to SharePoint, it is important for the medical librarian to become actively involved in the process. The experience can be an excellent opportunity to work as a team member with other departments that provide medical education services in order to develop an organized plan of information delivery. A piecemeal approach to learning the basics of developing and maintaining an individual department portal within the larger intranet hospital system portal can be an effective way to work with the Information Technology (IT) department over an extended period of time. Applications such as a library blog, pulling in useful RSS feeds, library request forms with automated delivery, tutorial, and presentation delivery mechanisms are a few things to consider presenting to the hospital network through the new library portal. Future expansion of online library services should be anticipated in order to create a robust Web site. Once the intranet foundation is in place for all hospital departments, SharePoint's collaborative potential can be explored through virtual team workspaces and shared document and slide libraries. This can be an excellent mechanism to show the value of the hospital library in supporting other hospital departments.

KEYWORDS:

• enterprise portal
• hospital information systems
• hospital libraries
• intranet
• library services
• SharePoint
• Web site development

Notes

Comments and suggestions should be sent to the Column Editors: Sally A. Harvey (E-mail: [email protected]); Donna Beales (E-mail: [email protected]); or Beth Carlin Robb (E-mail: [email protected]).

¹The author is contracted by Community Regional Medical Center to manage their Medical Library.