American Heart Association (AHA)

The American Heart Association (AHA) is a non-profit health organization whose mission since 1924 has been to reduce the incidence of death and disability from cardiovascular diseases and stroke - America’s No. 1 and No. 3 killers, through research, prevention and education. Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, the AHA has almost 500 employees at its National Center and its affiliates in the United States and Puerto Rico. Along with the AHA staff, four million volunteers are working to prevent heart disease and stroke. Two full-time librarians staff the AHA National Center Library. Vanessa Perez, who manages the Library, and Tracy Bearden field many of the information requests that come into the national center. Beyond automating library services at the national center, Vanessa and Tracy use Inmagic software in an interesting help-desk capacity.

"I Just heard it on the Radio..."

The AHA has an 800 number that experiences a heavy volume of calls. In cases where the request is beyond the scope of the resources available through the call center or the Public Information Office, these calls are referred to the national center library. "Requests made by our affiliates or from outside of the National Center usually relate to the AHA’s journals," says Vanessa. The American Heart Association publishes five journals, most notably Circulation: Journal of American Heart Association, published weekly. "If you see a news release or hear a big news story that mentions the American Heart Association, it’s most likely a result of new research results published in Circulation." The other four journals published by the AHA are Circulation Research, Hypertension, Stroke, and Arteriosclerosis Thrombosis and Vascular Biology.

"The most common requests that we get go something like this, ‘I heard on the news about a new study published in an AHA Journal about the fact that drinking red wine is good for your heart. But, I don’t know what issue it was in, or the name of the article or author…I just heard it on the radio’." "Using WebPublisher with our news release database," says Vanessa, "we can keyword search by typing in the word "wine" and locate the news release that had that particular word in it. In the indexing we have the journal’s name, volume, issue, page numbers, and authors, so we can quickly and easily find the information the caller is seeking

Adaptability, Flexibility

"We originally started talking about putting the library catalog(s) up on the intranet with Inmagic DB/Text® WebPublisher in mid-summer, and we were up and running by Fall", said Vanessa. The AHA library databases were created with DB/TextWorks® , Inmagic’s desktop product that serves as the buildware. "Two and one-half months from proposal to implementation was a quick start, thanks to our intranet project team, Webmaster and Inmagic Technical support." In the library, Vanessa and Tracy developed the "search" and "help" pages, and put those up using DB/Text WebPublisher’s HTML export capability, making the library data accessible to everyone on the intranet. "Tailoring the information was easy. We simply adapted our DB/TextWorks databases, eliminating a couple of fields and adding some customization," said Vanessa.

Customization Counts

At present, the AHA uses their Inmagic DB/TextWorks databases and DB/Text WebPublisher exclusively on the corporate intranet. Both Vanessa and Tracy use them daily to answer requests from people both internally and externally. "What I like about Inmagic software is that it lets you easily format your information so that it’s more identifiable by your users. If you want to change the descriptor field to be a key word, you can do that. If you want to tailor the Web page front end that lets you search the database, you have the flexibility to make it look any way you want – use the company logo, which we’ve done, design your own background, etc.," said Vanessa. "Basically, Inmagic gives you everything that you need to just jump right in and use it right out of the box, so you can be productive right away. But you also get the flexibility to be able to tailor, customize, and make your information more specific to your own functionality."

"Inmagic software is very flexible, easy to use, and highly customizable. It’s not complicated to get in there and change something if you want … you don’t have to be a programmer. We’ve pretty much grown along with the product. I’ve been using Inmagic for about 7 years now, and I’ve noticed that products themselves have improved over the years. You can tell there’s a lot of listening going on in the product development side of things."

An Excellent Library Tool

The AHA National Center Library manages a circulating collection of approximately 2000 titles, a reference collection of 450 volumes, and about 340 journal titles. The National Center Library also maintains over 100 Web pages of information on the AHA’s intranet site making the Library’s DB/TextWorks databases available to all AHA staff across the country. "We have a page that says ‘Welcome to the catalog page, pick your database’," says Vanessa. "Users can then go to the book catalog database, journal catalog, or the news release database, and from each of these they will utilize the search form we’ve created to query the databases and access help pages. The library’s intranet site also includes descriptions of our on-line services, book ordering, and interlibrary loan services." Vanessa also created an entire series of annotated "hot links" pages on various topics so users don’t have to hunt around the Web and wonder if they’re finding quality sites to visit.

With H/R & Marketing Applications Too

Recently, at the request of AHA’s marketing department, Vanessa started including data from the marketing survey files in her book catalog as well. These files include surveys, marketing reports, etc. "It was an interesting request," says Vanessa. "For example, someone from Marketing might call up and say ‘a couple of years ago we did a survey for the development of a cookbook…can you get that for me?’ They might not remember much about it, the title is long gone -- they just remember the consultant that worked on it. So I can search the database for author and key words."

The training arm of the AHA Human Resources department currently uses DB/TextWorks to catalog their training materials, another example of how Inmagic software is much more than just a traditional library application. When the training group employed Inmagic software for its own uses, the library staff became on-site Inmagic "product support" specialists. Tracy Bearden serves this role for the Human Resources application and in addition to providing tips on how to use DB/TextWorks, catalogs all of the training books.

Visit the AHA Web site at www.americanheart.org. The AHA Library hosts the two "Other Resources" pages with links on the American Heart Association Internet Web site. Vanessa Perez can be reached via e-mail at vanessap@heart.org, or for general information call the American Heart Association at 800-AHA-USA1.

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Revised: 03/19/04