The evolution of the IAIMS: lessons for the next decade.

The Integrated Academic (Advanced) Information Management System (IAIMS) initiative emerged in the early 1980s to respond to trends in biomedical information, transfer and access, and to identify the implications for health sciences libraries. Three recurrent themes have emerged as being essential to the creation of IAIMs: changing the paradigm; redirecting expenditures to build reuseable infrastructure; and working across cultural boundaries. An IAIMS penetrates an organization in four stages: from creating awareness; through development of foundation infrastructure; through integration as an extra effort; to integration as a byproduct of organizational structure and information architecture. Extension of the IAIMS to support a regional area is a natural fifth stage that reapplies the processes of the first four stages and re-uses the infrastructure that has been built within the cooperating organizations. Area IAIMSs have the potential to transform biomedicine by enabling new paradigms for manpower development and publication of information.