Why Create A Digital Video
Common Currency?

Medical schools have been investigating methods of storing and sharing their digital media files for years. These discussions have ranged from national digital repositories to shared open-source platforms and of course in-house initiatives. However, despite both good intentions and major technical progress, we believe Canadian medical schools are still unable to take full advantage of their rich technological resources because:

• Most of the current content development is being done in one-time, limited-funding projects within a single medical school, usually complex formats, and with no time or funding to coordinate or share the results with others.
• The fear of and uncertainty about copyright and intellectual property laws, as well as the often unstated wish to "protect" materials from distribution in hope of future commercial use, limits the amount of material that is openly shared.
• Most of the existing online media libraries, though technically sophisticated, do not have clear plans to organize and manage the building up of content collections beyond the pilot stage, and tend to contain only "test" content.

In order to address the root causes of these problems, we propose the development of general guidelines (and a number of concrete examples) for the creation of a standard format, or "common currency," for shareable multimedia medical education materials; one that is inexpensive to produce, but which produces consistently high quality results. We would also like to identify a forum in which the development of medical education content can be coordinated, to reduce duplication and gaps in the materials available. In all this, we hope to be able to work closely together with members of the Association of Faculties of Medicine in Canada (AFMC) Medical Informatics Working Group, as well as with the HealthLibrary.ca project at McGill, a part of the Molson Medical Informatics project.