Document Type : Letter to editor

Author

• Meisam Dastani

PhD candidate in knowledge and information science (information Retrieval). Payame Noor University, Tehran, Iran. Head of Information Services and Knowledge Translation, vice chancellor for research and technology, Gonabad University of Medical Sciences, Gonabad, Iran

Abstract

Covid19 is a viral disease (Coronavirus 2019) that was created in December 2019 in Wuhan (China) and quickly spread worldwide (1). It is a serious challenge for public sanitation and the health of societies. Like other pandemic diseases, people want to know what can be done to prevent and treat the disease. Considering that no specific control or method is developed to prevent and treat this disease yet, early diagnosis and prompt treatment are of crucial importance because not only does the patient become involved in the disease, but it also significantly increases the risk of transmitting the infection and its subsequent expansion (2). So self-care and self-control are vital to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The people of communities that are infected with COVID-19 should be trained about how to protect themselves against risks and harms of this new unknown virus. Considering that the universities of medical sciences are responsible for promoting the health of the people in their catchment area, one of the main tasks of these organizations during this crisis is to train the people about how to prevent and treat this new virus. In this way, in addition to conducting research and publishing the results as scientific articles, medical universities have developed content in various multimedia formats to inform people as well as to train them about how to prevent the spread of the disease. Developed contents on the internet, such as websites of medical universities and social networks, are available to the community. Of course, since appropriate information is not available on the internet, most of the developed contents are published on weblogs and channels of social media and instant messaging such as Soroush, Eta, and Telegram. Because these contents cannot be searched through search engines such as Google (3), they are not widely available to the public and are only accessible in a limited number of networks and channels. Even these contents may be removed from social media or webpages before being publicly available. Therefore, developing and disseminating information and knowledge is one of the main tasks of universities (4), and the storage and preservation of this knowledge are of great importance for universities and scientific centers. Besides, public access to
these contents and their storage are so important so that medical universities in each province or city can collect and keep these contents by creating Internet websites or institution repository (5). Therefore, universities can make available content on the web by managing this information and the resources generated in the university.

Keywords

• COVID 19 Pandemic
• Archive
• Online system
• educational materials