WebINQUIRER: Transition of an Educational Database to a Platform-Independent Environment

The microbiology version of the MacINQUIRER was developed to instruct first-year medical school students at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC) in clinical microbiology. It is one part of an overall educational suite of microbiology, pharmacology, toxicology, and virology computer-assisted learning tools. MacINQUIRER is also used extensively as an informatics research tool at UNC to examine computer-assisted learning in a medical environment, including patterns of query selection and preferences for hypertext or Boolean search methodologies. MacINQUIRER is a Hypercard application consisting of descriptions of 65 medically significant bacterial organisms. The entire application is searchable by an exhaustive but controlled vocabulary interface permitting queries on every field found in the Hypercard stack. As the School of Medicine gradually transitions away from the Macintosh and into Wintel platforms, a new means of accessing MacINQUIRER is needed. The suggested strategy was to make the INQUIRER model accessible through the World Wide Web. The result of this effort is WebINQUIRER.