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Present state of the ELISAD gateway project
Phase I January 2002 to September 2002
Phase II October 2002 to June 2003
After having achieved EC funding and the formal contracting procedure, the gateway project was operated on a more official level. The duration of the gateway project in this context is from January 2002 to June 2003. Summarised below is an overview of activities in this framework.
Resulting from the experimental process during 2001, a revised version of the online inputform was edited in php in order to automatically process data into the catalogue. As a standardised research instrument, the form combines qualitative and quantitative methods in freetext fields and checkboxes for terms. During the month of January, a draft of the relational server database in MySQL format was realised. It serves as the catalogue for all bibliographic data about AOD websites described during the project. The experimental implementation was performed to serve as a demo version for the next working group meeting.
During this period, the participating libraries revised the preliminary estimates of ATOD websites (Stockholm 2001) and formulated their ideas for networking between organisations in the project framework.
In February, a meeting of the gateway project group was held in Lisbon, hosted at the EMCDDA. It started with an overview on the formal framework procedure of the project. Input oriented work focused on the review of results from the exploration of existing websites in European countries. Another main issue was the revision of the online form. Changes in its structure were decided according to the following subjects of websites: psychoactive substances, substance use and addictive behaviour, social and health consequences, prevention / education, treatment / services, policy, economics, history / culture, research, populations / audiences, settings. Moreover, the form includes bibliographic fields for title, publisher, languages, abstract etc and types of resources available. An evaluation part serves to collect internal administrative data. Additionally, the agenda included a discussion of quality criteria, a revision of the scope policy draft, a preview of raw drafts for output screens and sitemap, and a demonstration of search options examples. The concept for project promotion and user consulting was presented and discussed. For more details, please see the minutes of the Lisbon meeting.
Subsequently, the meeting was followed by the implementation of the changes into the database and form script. In the month of March, test data entries were performed (3 per country) in order to start scripting the administrational database functions. At this time, the gateway project was presented at the Prevnet conference Telematics in prevention held in Athens from March 15 17, 2002
In this period, networking activities and communications with potential cooperating institutions and organisations were started by project participants, to be maintanined and extended during the entire project timeframe.
Addresses of professionals in AOD treatment, prevention and research were collected by the participants. On this base, a first survey of prospective gateway users was conducted during the month of April. A questionnaire was distributed by snowball system, inquiring about information needs, queries and searches on the web. The 141 responses were then subject to an in-depth analysis of results.
Another activity was the presentation of gateway project at the SALIS conference in Washington DC from April 16-20, 2002 .
Resulting from the work process, it was necessary to organise a technical meeting of the project experts and the programmer at the university Bremen in the month of May. During this reunion, the revision of keyword catalogue of each thematic section was performed. They are considered as the basis of the subject categories for browsing the catalogue contents into the interfaces of the gateway website. There is a close relation between the database field structure and the subjects in the form with the tree structure of the gateway sitemap. To ensure a better understanding of functions and programming options, a technical sharing on the database was a main subject, featuring a principal presentation and testing of algorithms for browsing e.g. within major subjects and countries. This work relates to output options of the gateway website, and additional ways of searching and retrieval to be developed. More work issues focused to develop a style guidance and a terms synonyms glossary. For more details, see the minutes of the Bremen technical meeting.
The most important result of this meeting was the creation of an offline word tool with an integrated input manual commenting each field to facilitate the input work. The winputform serves as a help function to support high data quality and consistency. Subsequently, the data collection process was started on May 20 and will be continued during the entire project.
During this period, the Spanish documentation centre of the Plan Nacional Sobre Drogas joined the project group and since then belongs to the project participants (list). It is also tried to establish contacts to the IPDT in Portugal.
An update on Eastern Europe websites from drug experts in these countries was joined to the existing collection. The gateway project was promoted on different journals. In this time, drafting of html browsing pages was started.
During the month of August, the implementation of html browsing lists was achieved on the server elisad.uni-bremen.de, including php scripts to generate data contents from the database. A lay-out draft was created in order to publish the prototype online. Data input and networking activities were ongoing in order to achieve 50% of data within the first project phase.
Joining the project participants work and technical reports, in September the interim project report was compiled and delivered to the European Commission. It is complemented by a book of 14 Annexes, including all work materials produced in the frame of the project. A training on internet use and gateway issues for participants from the Eastern European contries (CEECs) was conducted in cooperation with the EMCDDA Phare project at the university Bremen.
The draft of the Elisad gateway website was implemented at www.elisad.uni-bremen.de.
The second project phase started with a meeting of the gateway working group in Bremen in October. The preliminary state of achievements was summarised, problems and questions were discussed, and decisions were taken concerning the next working steps. See the minutes of the Bremen meeting and the time table.
Resulting from a joint training on website evaluation, several minor changes in the input form and the edit facility were agreed. A collective brainstorming focused on the creation of the guided search functions for the gateway catalogue.
It was agreed to integrate a 3rd project group meeting into the process, to take place in Utrecht at the Trimbos Instituut on April 10-12, 2003. Another idea was to initiate a gateway launch party if there is any budget available.
Data collection is going on continously. In order to cope with the large time amount for website description, the group will focus more on the networking aspect and distribute the word offline tool to supervised contributors within each country. During November, a promotion flyer was created to enable libraries to distribute it to potential networking institutions, and to inform their users on the project.
The final draft of the gateway website is intended to be available in December 2002 before christmas.
