Client: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Challenge: Create a publicly accessible gateway to the Centers' growing library of high resolution, print-quality imagery. Solution: The Public Health Image Library (PHIL), a highly customizable, searchable database providing downloadable access to roughly 9,000 high quality digital images, illustrations and videos. Results: PHIL is one of the most visited CDC Web sites and regarded as the premier collection of public health-related imagery available for public use in the world. Related Information Read a case study about the National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS). Learn more about CSC's Public Health Services capabilities. Visit CSC's Government and Health Services sites. Contact us and let our experience help you produce results.

The photo at the right shows Dr. Taronna Maines, a microbiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) inoculating a 10-day old hen's eggs with H5N1 avian influenza virus, to learn about newly emerging H5N1 viruses. Farther down this page is a picture of Aedes japonicus, the mosquito suspected of spreading West Nile virus in the U.S.

Both images, along with thousands of other digital photos, illustrations and videos relating to public health, are available free of charge through the CDC's Public Health Image Library.

The CDC stores images ranging from virus close-ups and disease symptoms to old health posters in its Public Health Image Library (PHIL), in which archives date back to the 19th century. Collaborating with the CDC and its state and local partners, CSC helped open PHIL to the public by creating a Web gateway to the growing library.

Building an image library
"Much of the information critical to the communication of public health messages is pictorial rather than text-based," says Eric Grafman, CDC's PHIL project lead. "So the CDC provides PHIL for healthcare professionals, teachers, researchers, students and the public to use for reference, teaching, publication and presentation."

The joint CSC-CDC team organized PHIL's collections into a user friendly, searchable online environment. CSC archivist Hugh Kelsey digitized historical collections from around the United States for inclusion in the library.

The former librarian also worked to add a controlled vocabulary to the content to make it more accessible via Web searches, supplementing the existing keyword search. This included adding the National Library of Medicine's Medical Subject Headings to images. "We also created different areas on the site for the different roles users needed it for," he says.

CSC photographer Greg Knobloch shot many original photographs for PHIL, ranging in subject from historical public health events to the use of a powered air-purifying respirator inside a biological safety cabinet.

Improving the user experience
Prior to PHIL 3.0's launch in April 2005, CSC's team pulled content into a simple user interface developed by CSC Web developer Barry Newman, who also educated the CDC team on the technical possibilities of creating an intricate Web design that lets users easily research and find digital images.

Capabilities built into the new system include increased Web accessibility for field teams, links to streaming videos, and improved navigation and image cataloging. Shopping cart functionality was also added, allowing users to select and store images for later download.

"The original version was inefficient in the methods by which you navigated through pages, the number of images a user could view per page, and the amount of detail shown with each image," Newman explains. "We built a very robust desktop tool that allows administrative users to easily upload images, categories, and templates for new images and a queuing system that allows them to keep uploading images as the server catches up."

After the redesign was completed, traffic to the image library increased roughly 50 percent, equaling some 2,500 visitors per day. The improved site also experienced added interest from state health departments, with PHIL referenced on approximately 30 state sites, compared to only four prior to CSC's involvement.

PHIL's new look
Currently in version 3.0, PHIL has grown from a collection of 1,200 low-resolution and scarcely cataloged images to a robust offering of 9,000 downloadable images on various public health topics.

"The public health nature of this imagery is found nowhere else in the world," says Grafman. "It reflects the evolution of public health on an ongoing basis more so than any other database."

PHIL can also store up to 2,000 characters of informational text per image. "Initially, the data accompanying images was mainly to provide a prototypical rendition of what the image could be and what could be made available to the healthcare community," he says. "We upgraded it so it would be much more useful for various demographic groups."

The upgrades were designed in open code, allowing internal CDC groups to quickly customize content, focusing on a single health topic such as tuberculosis.

Updated daily, PHIL is one of the most visited CDC Web sites. "Now, PHIL is a great resource," Newman says. "It's one of the few sources of print-quality imagery on the Web that relates to the public health sector."

Visit the Public Health Image Library