Health Sciences Online
A colleague today asked my opinion of the new Health Sciences Online resource. As I'd never heard of it I took a look.
It claims to be "the first website to deliver authoritative, comprehensive, free, and ad-free health sciences knowledge", however I've worked on several projects making that claim over the last few years...
HSO launched in September 2008 as a virtual learning center with browse and search functions covering top-quality courses and references (over 50,000 at present) in medicine, public health, pharmacy, dentistry, nursing, basic sciences, and other health sciences disciplines. It is supported by the Canadian and British Columbian governments, the World Health Organization, NATO’s Science for Peace Program, the Annenberg Physician Training Program, and the Ulrich and Ruth Frank Foundation for International Health. The founding collaborators include CDC, World Bank, the American College of Preventive Medicine, and the University of British Columbia.
Although it is more international in scope (and probably has more money), the approach of making high quality relevant resources easy to find on a browsable and searchable web site was the one we used in the OMNI and NMAP projects for UK higher education nearly ten years ago. OMNI and NMAP now form part of the Intute service and similar functionality and resources can be found in parts of the UK NHS's National Library for Health.
What I can't see in HSO, and were important aspects of NMAP and OMNI, was a clear public statement about the selection criteria being used for the inclusion of resources - I have asked HSO about this, but have not received a response yet. I've also asked about the way in which the resources are displayed and whether there are particular biases eg towards US materials - it will be interesting to see what they say.
It will be interesting to see how the HSO service develops and whether we will see increasing synergy or competition between the various sites providing these sorts of services. I also wonder, as the World Health Organisation is one of the supporters, whether this is seen as being a step along the road to a controlled .health top level domain on the world wide web.
It claims to be "the first website to deliver authoritative, comprehensive, free, and ad-free health sciences knowledge", however I've worked on several projects making that claim over the last few years...
HSO launched in September 2008 as a virtual learning center with browse and search functions covering top-quality courses and references (over 50,000 at present) in medicine, public health, pharmacy, dentistry, nursing, basic sciences, and other health sciences disciplines. It is supported by the Canadian and British Columbian governments, the World Health Organization, NATO’s Science for Peace Program, the Annenberg Physician Training Program, and the Ulrich and Ruth Frank Foundation for International Health. The founding collaborators include CDC, World Bank, the American College of Preventive Medicine, and the University of British Columbia.
Although it is more international in scope (and probably has more money), the approach of making high quality relevant resources easy to find on a browsable and searchable web site was the one we used in the OMNI and NMAP projects for UK higher education nearly ten years ago. OMNI and NMAP now form part of the Intute service and similar functionality and resources can be found in parts of the UK NHS's National Library for Health.
What I can't see in HSO, and were important aspects of NMAP and OMNI, was a clear public statement about the selection criteria being used for the inclusion of resources - I have asked HSO about this, but have not received a response yet. I've also asked about the way in which the resources are displayed and whether there are particular biases eg towards US materials - it will be interesting to see what they say.
It will be interesting to see how the HSO service develops and whether we will see increasing synergy or competition between the various sites providing these sorts of services. I also wonder, as the World Health Organisation is one of the supporters, whether this is seen as being a step along the road to a controlled .health top level domain on the world wide web.
Labels: Internet Health, search technology
posted by Rod at
8:27 PM
1 Comments:
Two points - the North Americans do exhibit more 'effectively' and ability to market what they are doing, giving a positive spin that may not be totally justified.
The other point re 'WHO involvement'is that WHO is a very large organisation and the link could be through one (part) of it - it probably does not explicitly state that! or the source may be (considering) becoming part of the project that makes material freely available from 100 publishers to Developing Countries (ref Y Kwankap at Medinfo2007).
I have used OMNI etc for years - its position is well known to actual users; perhaps the point is to try and map out all the sources that operate these features for the benefit of the domain asa whole? Has anyone got a PhD student in Knowledge Management who might be interested ????
Dr Jean Roberts
UCLAN, UK
By
Jean R, at 8:45 AM
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