Slice of Life Project
The Slice of Life Project was a non-profit collaborative project of the University of Salt Lake City , Utah from 1985 to 2007 to produce and distribute educational materials using computers, multimedia and new media for medical school and health professionals .
Project flow
In 1986 the first optical disc or "laser videodisc" - an analog forerunner of the DVD - of the project with over 12,000 images from medical fields was published. The aim was to provide a visual database of images that could be used by students and professors. In this sense, the project can be described as a forerunner of Wikimedia Commons, but restricted only to non-commercial academic use and for the health professions. Suzanne Stensaas was one of the main organizers of the project.
The final edition of the image plate was SOL VII (Slice of Life, 7th Edition) and included contributions from 63 institutions, two professional societies, a pharmaceutical company and 240 individuals from the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe and Australia. The image plate contained 44,000 images and 65 video sequences from the fields of cardiology, cytology, embryology, anatomy, hematology, histology, microbiology, neuroanatomy, parasitology, pathology, radiology, gastroscopy, colonoscopy, dermatology and ophthalmology. The optical discs were sold at a cost of US $ 300. There are no more optical disks available. Digitization and publication as DVD or CD-ROM was discussed, but was ultimately not implemented.
Annual workshops were held from 1989 to 2007, the penultimate one in 2006 in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the last workshop in 2007 in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.
Sister project
A sister project to Slice of Life is HEAL (Health Education Assets Library). 22,000 medical digital materials are provided under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 (creative commons NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported).
outlook
Since 2008, the activities and spirit of the project have been brought into the annual workshops of the International Association of Medical Science Educators (IAMSE).