Auditing dynamic links to online information resources

The Columbia University Infobutton Manager (IM) is a system that provides dynamically generated, context-specific links between clinical information systems and online information resources. The resources range from local documents, to commercially available document sets and search engines. The links provided by the IM can be reliably created, but there is no guarantee that they will function reliably, since the resources to which they point are subject to unannounced changes and failures. We have developed a set of tools to audit the links periodically to determine if the resources are available and if the IM has sufficient information to generate all the links needed by its users. These tools have been in use since February, 2006 and have provided timely warnings on many occasions. These warnings have allowed us to correct problems with resource access before they became apparent to our users and often before the resource maintainers were aware of the problems. The tools have thus helped us provide clinicians with a dependable level of service.