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ELISAD Gateway Project : Building a portal to quality internet resources on Alcohol and other Drugs (AOD)
1 - Project history (1999-2000)
idea and conception / explorative working phases, meetings and results / links to other gateways
2 - Explorative project phase (2001)
framework and meetings / materials
Since January 2002, the work on the gateway is furtheron conducted in the frame of a project financed by the European Commission for 18 months. An online prototype of this information services is planned to be available in summer 2002. Further information can be found at www.elisad.uni-bremen.de.
1 Project History 1999 - 2000
The idea to create a subject gateway on alcohol and other drugs (AOD) originated at the 1999 annual ELISAD meeting at Lisbon. Emerging from presentations of Lynn Robinson and Greet van der Spek on internet websites in AOD, a discussion of the participants focused on the general difficulty in finding reliable and credible information on the web, especially in the drugs area.
As a consequence, plans for the conceptualization and realization of an ELISAD Subject Gateway were continued. The Gateway will consist of a guide to quality drug-related information and resources on the internet. This guide will be structured by thematic topics and countries. Each European country will provide a selection of AOD quality websites. The gateway will be available for the professional and general public within the ELISAD website. The aim is to facilitate the access to appropriate information in the drug field and enhance userfriendliness within the WWW. Basis of the ELISAD gateway will be a database, containing metadata resulting from evaluation of websites included.
Explorative working phases and meetings from 2000-2001
Phase 1:
A framework for the description of internet offers is the result of a working meeting held at the TRIMBOS Instituut, Utrecht /The Netherlands, 6 April 2000. Participants : ELISAD : Anne Singer, TOXIBASE (France): Marie-Lise Priouret, Thomas Rouault, GRUPPO ABELE (Italy): Lucia Bianco, TRIMBOS (Netherlands): Greet van der Spek, ARCHIDO (Germany): Susanna Prepeliczay.
This Description Scheme English Version will be used as a standardized tool to describe the Websites. For the German Portal alternatively the German Version of this Scheme will be used.
Working Stages: April - September: Tracking on the net, identifying websites, analysis. Feedback between the participants to update selection criteria and description scheme.
September - October: Merge of descriptive records. Assessment of results between participants.
Results of Phase 1:
A presentation of the bilingual trial versions of the subject gateway was done at the ELISAD 12th annual conference, Prague 4-6 November 2000. A workshop with the ELISAD members was performed on objectives, functionality and other methodological issues.
Please see the preliminary versions of the German portal to the ELISAD Subject Gateway (ARCHIDO) and the French Portal to the ELISAD Subject Gateway (TOXIBASE).
The Gateway Project Concept is also presented in the ELISAD Electronic Journal, Issue No.2, June 2000 and in ELISAD journal No.5, 2001. The complete issues of the Electronic Journal are available at https://elisad.org .
Phase 2:
To facilitate further evaluation of European websites, an electronic tool was created from November 2000 to February 2001. To include descriptive data entries, an online form will be used. Data collected with this tool is intended to be sent simultaneously to TOXIBASE and ARCHIDO, who are responsible for database management. The central database will be hosted at the uni-bremen.de server.
On March 29, 2001, the ELISAD gateway group met at Paris to examine the draft of this research tool and to discuss tasks and further coordination of the project. Participants were: Anne Singer (ELISAD), Thomas Rouault and Marie-Lise Priouret (TOXIBASE), Stephan Schulte-Naehring (DrugScope), Patricia Brigoni and Lucia Bianco (Gruppo Abele), Gunnel Larsson (CAN), Marielle Zeeman (TNO), Hana Sovinova (SZU), Susanna prepeliczay (ARCHIDO) and Marianne van der Heyden (Bureau Andromeda).
Outcomes of this reunion and next working steps were:
- the necessity and concrete proposals to improve user-friendlyness of the gateway form corresponding to the needs of the gateway. It was also decided to compile an user manual.
- the necessity to compare the fields of the gateway form and database to international standards of comparable projects, like Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), DESIRE and EDDRA.
- a test fill-in of the advanced gateway form version will be asked to all ELISAD members.
For more details, please see the Paris gateway meeting minutes (St. Schulte-Naehring).
A number of working papers resulted from this next working stage performed from April 2001 to September 2001.
As the gateway project has been so far a voluntary work engagement of the team, efforts were made to acquire financial funding for the project to secure its performance on a more elaborate level. In January 2001, an application for funding for the project "ELISAD Gateway on Alcohol and Other Drugs" was submitted to the European Commission by ARCHIDO in close collaboration with ELISAD gateway group members.
To reflect the present stage of the project and specify the next steps, an extraordinary meeting of the gateway working group is planned in the frame of the ELISAD annual meeting at Stockholm on wednesday October 24, 2001.
Links to other www gateways and related projects
There is a growing number of similar efforts and projects to give internet information offers a topic-related, structured access. Projects founded by the European Commission are encompassing different gateway projects which aim to develop standardised structures and methods.
2 - Explorative project phase (2001)
European project funding approved.
While the gateway project has been so far a voluntary work engagement of the team, efforts were made to acquire financial funding for the project to secure its performance on a more elaborate level. In January 2001, an application for funding for the project "ELISAD Gateway on Alcohol and Other Drugs" was submitted to the European Commission by ARCHIDO in close collaboration with ELISAD gateway group members. In absence of any national co-financing, this project is based on amounts of voluntary work from ELISAD and 8 ELISAD member organisations.
In June 2001, The European Commission stated approval for the ELISAD gateway project ! This means that ELISAD will be able to deliver a product of elaborated quality fitting to the demands of modern information technology. In the meantime, the EC asked for several changes of the budget plan and focus, excluding non-candidate countries from their funding authorisation etc etc...
The official project start was planned for September 2001. Due to the complex administration process of the EC contracting procedure, there is a delay of the starting date. It is now planned to start in January 2002. We hope to receive the contract soon to realise subcontracting with the project partners. From the contract submission date on, funded project duration will be 18 months. See the official timetable from the application.
While all ELISAD member organisations will be involved in the networking process, 11 partner organisations will take responsibility for concrete tasks to be performed in the gateway development.
For reflection of the work process and specification of tasks among the participants, an "extraordinary" gateway meeting is planned in the frame of the 2001 ELISAD annual meeting at Stockholm. As this meeting was planned before any funding decision was known, participation is recommended on a voluntary basis. See the Stockholm gateway meeting agenda and the Stockholm meeting minutes.
In the coming working phase, 2 process meetings are officially planned at Lisbon, Portugal and at Bremen, Germany.
Each participant is asked to prepare an explorative listing of AOD websites from their own country as well as abroad countries according to the tasks distribution table. These reports will serve to generate a realistic estimate of websites to be included to the ELISAD subject gateway and thus explore the gateway size and amount of data collection / websites evaluation to be performed. Those who can not be present at Stockholm are asked to send their website list via email to before October 20, 2001.
Working Materials.
Basic documents: The following guidelines for the inclusion of websites to the ELISAD subject gateway were formulated in order to function as a methodological base:
the Gateway Scope Policy as a definition of the thematic focus
the Selection Criteria as a definition of qualitative elements
One objective of the ELISAD gateway is to be comparable to other international standardised information systems which can be used as a model. It is recommended to follow the methodological framework of the DESIRE Information Gateways Handbook (2000).
Data collection: To facilitate data input resulting from website evaluation, an online form was created which gives thematic and qualitative options corresponding to the scope and quality criteria. Check boxes and freetext fields are also corresponding to database fields. Information submitted with this form will include the technical option to automatically insert a complete record set of data into the server database. It is planned to establish an editorial board within the working group to review completeness and quality of data input before database recording. The form follows a combination principle of descriptive options in several subject areas. The terminology used in the form has been re-checked with categories and definitions from the TOXIBASE thesaurus version 2.0 and the NIAAA (USA) alcohol and other drugs thesaurus to find an adaption from bibliographic use for indexation of web resources in an European focus.
More working papers: dataset example (complete fields), dataset selection (test fill-in) and gateway search result draft.
The next step will result from creation and discussion of the preliminary website draft and appropriateness of its ordering system and structure, in comparison to other gateway websites.
A test run of the gateway form will be made to examine its user-friendlyness and functionality. A compilation of working papers will assure a continuous documentation of the process.
