Electronic Editing: Related Links

compiled by Judith West

ARTICLE-TOPIC LINKS (see "The Age of Electronic Editing" in Clips, January 2006)

• American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA)—AHIMA is a major health information management (HIM) association, founded in 1928, dedicated to promoting the profession and practice of handling personal health records.

• Perspectives in Health Information Management (PHIM)—PHIM is the online scholarly research journal of AHIMA whose mission is “to advance health information management practice and to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration” with supporting disciplines.” Published eight times annually. Journal volumes and white papers accessible online free of charge. Associated e-publications include the quasi-weekly AHIMA Advantage E-alert newsletter and the student-created Student Connection e-news.

PRODUCTS, SERVICES, ETC.

• Chicago Manual of Style—Information on and assistance with this widely used editing and publishing reference, including a useful and humorous Q&A forum, appear as part of the Web site of the University of Chicago Press.

• Dreamweaver®—Now an Adobe product (formerly from Macromedia), Dreamweaver is a major web design, development, and maintenance software tool. A full-length tutorial is available free at the Intranet Journal. For more Dreamweaver resources, advice, and training, see Google's Directory page on the subject.

• Microsoft Word®—For immediate as-you-work assistance, search for terms like “track changes,” “word count,” and “versioning” via Word's extensive Help menu files (select Help > Microsoft Word Help or Help > Show the Office Assistant). For additional Word assistance, try Microsoft's Word Experts resources or check out the advice and tutorials in Google's Directory.

RELATED LINKS FOR FURTHER INFO

• Google Directory—Find resources on major and some less-known software products under the heading Computers>Software, http://www.google.com/Top/Computers/Software/.

  NOTE: The Google Directory—an admirable but often overlooked sibling of Google's vastly popular search engine—usefully recognizes that linear classification methods complement rather than compete with the wider search-query approach. In the directory's case, users “drill down” through index-style subject headings to compiled lists of resource links.

• PDF Documents: Adobe and Beyond—Most people with any Web-searching experience have downloaded Adobe Reader to view and print Adobe's signature PDF (portable document format) files. The company introduced and produces Adobe Acrobat, but many other companies have since developed PDF-related authoring, reading, and conversion software. Investigate some of the latter (many cheap or free) by searching the invaluable software site Download.com.

• Scanning and Optical Character Recognition (OCR)—For starter information, look at this “what is” article on the About.com site: http://printscan.about.com/cs/scanners/a/about_ocr.htm. Steel yourself, though, for a bombardment of advertising. About.com offers free access to a considerable amount of useful information, but you'll take lots of annoying wrong turns to their advertising sponsors unless you read for commercial vs. noncommercial links.