Digital images in American and Canadian dentistry education: Second-stage needs assessment

This study serves as a follow-up to a previous needs assessment, which was intended to determine the need on the part of dental faculty members and researchers for an online repository of digitized dental images. The previous needs assessment found preliminary indications of such need. However, the previous needs assessment focused primarily on one exemplar institution, along with a brief survey of academic deans at U.S. and Canadian dental schools. The current needs assessment incorporated a survey intended to reach a much broader range of dental faculty members in the U.S. and Canada. The basic goals were to confirm the findings of the earlier needs assessment, to asses the potential value of potential image characteristics and metadata elements, as well as to begin determining whether dental faculty members and researchers would be willing to contribute to the repository.