AN APPROACH TO THE CREATION OF MULTIMEDIA TEXTBOOKS FOR RADIOLOGY INSTRUCTION

We developed a standardized approach for creating computerized multime dia textbooks based on four principles: (1) multimedia textbooks shoul d resemble printed books, (2) the creation of multimedia textbooks sho uld be relatively inexpensive, (3) multimedia textbooks should be comp letely digital, and (4) the construction of multimedia textbooks shoul d be simple. To facilitate this approach, an inexpensive, user-friendl y multimedia authoring tool called The Annotator was used. The Annotat or, a Hypercard-based program that runs on any Macintosh computer, hel ps authors rapidly create sophisticated radiologic multimedia textbook s. This program provides a textbooklike shell that can be filled with digitized media (video clips, audio clips, images, and text).This appr oach, which is applicable to any multimedia hardware platform, allows the authorship of multimedia textbooks that can be easily transported to any future multimedia platform.