link to contents page link to eLib page OMNI: Organising Medical Networked Information


Frank Norman, project co-ordinator, describes OMNI, what it can do for you (and you for it). OMNI is an eLib project from the Access to Network Resources programme area. It consists of a well-maintained and expanding database of medical and health resources that can be accessed through JANET/Internet. This database can be searched, via a World Wide Web browser; in addition, catalogues of the resources are available for browsing.

Access to Network Resources:ANR (ANswer to a prayeR)

Have you ever wanted a service that could quickly and reliably guide you through the Internet jungle to a quality source of well-maintained information? Do you despair of out-of-date bookmark lists that point you to obsolete web addresses, and too-powerful Internet robot indexers that retrieve everything but what you really wanted to find? Then read the good news about the eLib programme's Access to Network Resources (ANR) projects: SOSIG, OMNI, ADAM, EEVL, IHR-INFO, CAIN and ROADS. These seven projects are set to change the face of networked information use in the UK, bringing librarians' skills to bear on the tangled web of the Internet.

There is a tendency to speak of the Internet as a system but it is also possible to conceive of it as an information resource - infospace rather than cyberspace. Moving away from machine metaphors and towards metaphors of knowledge and information points the way to services based on human control rather than on machine control. The ANR projects take the model of the subject librarian as their starting point and apply this to the UK networked information world. Six of the projects will be devoted to creating gateways to resources in specific subjects, while one (ROADS) will develop a system to aid and automate the process of resource organisation and discovery.

OMNI

The OMNI gateway, launched in November 1995, is a WWW interface to a catalogue of biomedical and health related information available via JANET/Internet. It facilitates discovery of, and access to, resources likely to be of interest to the biomedical and healthcare academic community in the UK. OMNI is a quality service, facilitating access to useful information. Resources are not added to the gateway until they have been filtered, catalogued, classified and subject-indexed. The filtering process weeds out material that is out of date, inappropriate or strictly local in context. The cataloguing record includes a description of each resource.

Concerned with content rather than form

Internet enthusiasts talk about Internet "wildlife" (e.g. gophers, webs, spiders and subject trees) or maybe about types of information (directories, databanks, graphics, etc.). These approaches have their place but OMNI will be relatively unconcerned about the format of networked information resources, paying more attention to the actual information content - its quality and subject. OMNI adds value to information resources by:

Concentrating on a subject group

The word "medical" in the title of the project is a compromise and is used in its broadest sense to include clinical medicine, nursing, allied health professions, biological sciences, public health and health management. Although this might seem a very wide group of subjects, all these aspects of medicine are so intertwined that it makes sense to treat them together.

User liaison

A service is nothing without users and OMNI aims to develop good links with the user community in the UK higher education and research sectors. OMNI is launching its basic service early in the life of the project in an attempt to provide benefits to the community as soon as possible, and to give users the opportunity to mould the future service. The Internet has grown through a spirit of openness and feedback and OMNI hopes to grow in the same way.

Specialist knowledge

Many specialised classification and indexing schemes exist in different subject areas which aid retrieval of specialist concepts. In the medical area the (US) National Library of Medicine (NLM) maintain well-respected indexing and classification systems. Each resource in the OMNI database will be classified using the NLM classification scheme, widely used in medical libraries in the UK, as well as the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC). The MeSH thesaurus, as used in Medline and related healthcare databases, will be used to index resources. Later in the project the NLM's Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) will be used to enhance subject indexing.

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January 17th 1996 - Comments can be emailed to Ariadne