BIOME News

BIOME Sites goes live!

The BIOME site is now available at http://biome.ac.uk/

Please visit the site and fill in the feedback form accessible from the BIOME home page. We value you comments and suggestions.

We have learnt a great deal while developing the Service. The structure of BIOME, five separate gateways within one umbrella service, posed particular technical challenges, requiring much thought to overcome. The solution we have implemented is a locally written database management system, based on the ROADS software concepts, but designed using relational technology. This system meets local needs, whilst maintaining the inter-operability standards of the Resource Discovery Network.

The existing OMNI cataloguing and evaluation guidelines were also reviewed and expanded to reflect the new subject breadth of the Service and classification schemes and thesauri were identified for the four new BIOME gateways. We have chosen to implement the Dewey Decimal Classification Scheme as our BIOME level browse structure, to enable browsing across all the gateways within BIOME. This is our next major challenge and will involve the mapping of the different gateway level classification schemes / thesauri to the DDC scheme.

The core of the BIOME service is the searchable catalogue of quality-filtered life sciences web resources. BIOME is now participating in the Resource Discovery Network portal development project to investigate additional services to be offered via the site. The project will last 12 months and will include the exploration of new technologies and cross searching with other information collections beyond the RDN.

New Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professions Gateway

We are pleased to announce that BIOME has received funding from The Joint Information Systems Committee to develop a sub-gateway of OMNI, focussing on resources for Nursing, Midwifery and the Allied Health Professions. The gateway – NMAHP – will be launched in Spring 2001 and is being developed in partnership with The University of Sheffield and The Royal College of Nursing. Initial discussions have also taken place with representatives from the NHS to ensure that the NMAHP gateway develops in co-ordination with the NHS Electronic Library for Health programme. http://www.nelh.nhs.uk/

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