Objective 1 - Audience: This guide has been created for a lay audience with little experience in health topics, medical thinking, or health information seeking. Appropriately, little direction will be provided in finding in-depth, evidence-based citations, and more direction is provided to orient the user to the general information surrounding a topic.

Objective 2 - Inclusion: Materials included in the guide were selected so that:

• Users could learn from the ground up
• Materials selected include paths to more in-depth coverage of specific topics
• Materials are similar to those that a user might seek out on their own, but with the added value of organization and convenience

Objective 3 - Navigation: Health resources are many and varied. So much so that naviagtion of all possible resources becomes overwhelming and seems arbitrary. To remove this roadblock to efficient health resource information seeking, I try to limit the amount of different resources I pull information from. After much searching and trial and error, those resources turned out to be mayoclinic.com, my.webmd.com, and any site from a large association dealing with a specific topic. Also, this increases the likelihood that the Health Reference Guide will be easy to use over and over since one will only have to learn the navigation of those chosen sites to know how to navigate the Health Reference Guide ad a whole.

Objective 4 - Physical/Virtual: In this guide, print resources referenced will mostly be alternative/complimentary/integrative in nature. This is because evidence-based mainstream medicine is well-represented on the Web, and eminates from reputable sources. With an Internet connection, there is little need to seek out physical resources for an evidence-based approach (in fact, much more current information can often be found online). Alternative resources are also found in great numbers on the Web, but which sites are reputable and which are crooked are much more difficult to discern. Also, since alternative therapies are most often techniques that have been around much longer than evidence-based techniques, there is less need for current information. Publishing a physical book is tied to many social conventions that allow one to gauge the reputability of the author, editors, contributors, and so on. For these reasons, alternative medicine is primarily represented by print sources in this guide.

Objective 5 - Access: Materials selected for this site were chosen on the basis of equity of access.

Objective 6 - Longevity: Materials selected for this guide were chosen with an eye towards which resources will remain useful and existant over time.