Medical Resources on the World-Wide-Web
About the Project
Background
There is
nothing new on the idea of cataloging medical resources on the
Internet: in the early days of Internet, when medical resources
were rare, and gopher trees and discussion lists were the most
advanced technologies available, there was MEDRES, the invaluable
guide compiled by Lee Hancock.
Complications appeared after some time, when it became clear and
known how easy it is to maintain one's own information servers:
gopher trees got full of links (with much slower increase in the
number of terminal documents), and the resources became
uncomprehensible. Link collections became collections of links to
link collections, and there is not much possibility to evaluate
the resources. Search engines seem to be the right answer in most
fields: various engines allow to search the Internet space by
keywords, some of them bring really good results.
For medical resources, however, there remains a problem that the
search engines can not solve: their validation. Not only that the
user wants to find AN information resource - he/she wants to find
a good one.
Aim of the Project
This project was started at the 2nd School of Medicine, Charles University, Prague in 1995 - and its aim was to provide medical users with a catalog of valid Internet resources for various fields of medicine, and to create a Internet server for presentation of Czech medicine.
Present State
At present (January 1996), the collection contains links to more than 950 resources (WWW pages, databases, discussion lists, gopher documents) classified by medical disciplines. The WWW links are regularly verified as to their availability. It is our intention to include only links that contain valid and useful information - either useful primary documents, or links that are guaranteed by professional societies, universities, etc. Therefore, new links that are added to our collection contain information about their source, and a basic description.
Contributions Sought
We invite any comments, contributions (also complaints..). at med_res@lfmotol.cuni.cz. New links and new Web sites are growing rapidly - and we need your help to keep our service up-to-date.
Future
Future development: we are building a team of reviewers that search the Web for new resources in various medical disciplines (and we encourage you to collaborate with us). We are looking forward to start a form-based search engine over our collection - we believe that this might be a useful extension of our service.
We wish that you find our service useful - and we invite your comments at med_res@lfmotol.cuni.cz.
Back to 2nd School of Medicine Home Page