Some of the original NTIA grant was earmarked to pay for staffing of the project. In November 1994, a first step taken toward NOAH's development was to hire Kirsten Dehner. Kirsten's background is in Interactive Multimedia as a writer, content designer and producer of multimedia segments for various large business and educational projects, including "Columbus: Encounter, Discovery, and Beyond," a six-million dollar project for IBM via Synapse Technologies, Inc. Besides helping design other large-scale projects for IBM, Kirsten has acted as a consultant with Synapse for Ameritech, doing preliminary content design for their big bandwidth domains as they scoped out their role in digital technology.

Kirsten, in turn, was responsible for bringing much of the remaining staff together. Jason Budrow is Kirsten's overall assistant on the project, helping to design the information architecture and to restructure documentation into HTML, the World-Wide Web "language." Alex Leger, a City College graduate, is the Database Manager/System Administrator for the project, also helping with the design and acting as the Spanish translation "critic." Bob Morea of the CUNY/CIS Documentation Department provided graphic support in the design of the NOAH homepage.

Recently, two new members have joined the NOAH team. Dino Idnani, a familiar face to many on the 16th Floor at CUNY/CIS, is back as a general project assistant and will support the enterprise by writing HTML. Virginia Manbeck, formerly of METRO and currently NOAH's Content Consultant, will continue to verify the validity of health information on our server and keep Web links up-to-date. She will also train staff at partner libraries and other NOAH sites.