Preface

The work of creating an online OSCAR User's Manual has taken many years and with many helpers along the way. When OSCAR was first installed at the Maternity Centre of Hamilton in 2001, a beautiful and colorful paper manual was created by Trudy Chiswell. The manual was available for sale in paper format and on a CD. When OSCAR was released as an Open Source project on SourceForge on November 17, 2002 the PageMaker format of the original manual was converted to an Online Manual on the Plone based oscarmcmaster.org site by my daughter Joan Chan, and later edited by Laura Thorkildsen and Wendy Milburn. For those who love to collect old manuals, these are two older versions in pdf format which server earlier versions of OSCAR. They can be found referenced in the user manual section

This new oscarmanual is made possible by the donation from Mike Figurski who commissioned Deven Rich to start this new Plone v3.0 project.  This new users manual will include all the new features of OSCAR v10.06 and following.  Please refer to OSCAR roadmap for description of the various versions.

This User's Manual is a "living document", i.e. we will be making changes to this document constantly - kind of like the wikipedia idea. There are lots more writers (see the Collaborators page). The layout of this manual is very much discipline specific so writers of a particular discipline will be making changes to the pages that relate best to their discipline. The manual also includes information on all of the OSCAR projects, not just the EMR.

David Chan, MD

Associate Professor

Department of Family Medicine

McMaster University