ELISAD European Gateway on Alcohol and other Drugs / Final Research and Activity Report December 2003
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4. Conclusions and recommendations.
4.1. Achievements and added values of the gateway project
Added values achieved by the project results can be characterised in terms of European community value, of cross-European information transfer, and institutional networking.
The achievements of the 2002-2003 ELISAD gateway project working programme correspond to various EU community objectives, summarised as follows:
Programme of community action in the field of public health 2003-2008:
Improve information and knowledge for the development of public health (priority a)
Develop the health community in EU applicant countries (cross-cutting themes) through the coordination of NGO structures (e.g. ELISAD network) in the context of enlargement (2.1.2.3 priority)
Promote best practices: development of tools, methodologies, common approaches and definitions. Bring together competent EU authorities and applicant countries enabling them to cooperate more closely in health technology assessment and health promotion (2.1.5. priority)
Develop a sustainable information and knowledge system which involves definition and exchange of data that are available and collectable (priority 2.2.)
Improve and identify quality based information on priority health determinants through networking (priority 2.4), using experience gained under previous community health programmes : alcohol (priority 2.2.2.3: economic and social impact, protection factors, prevention and health education), Tobacco (priority 2.4.2.: prevention and control), Drugs (priority 2.4.4: in close connection with EMCDDA framework)
Action plan to combat drugs 2000-2004 (1) and EU drugs strategy 2000-2004 (2):
To progressively integrate the candidate countries in the framework of EMCDDA and Drug PHARE programme (a workshop on the Elisad gateway has been held during phase 1 in this context, and 7 participants from CEECs are involved)
To Continue processing of information with the support of EMCDDA (this agency has been closely associated to the project monitoring during phase 1 in 2002-2003)
To ensure collection, analysis and dissemination of objective, reliable and comparable data on the drug phenomenon
To evaluate Internet based information on drugs to counter illicit drug use (B5 objective)
Regarding the gateway information service, the added values can be specified within the following benefits for its users, and for the participants involved.
European community value: The project has increased networking between institiutions across Europe, including governmental bodies and non-governmental organisations, actors, and private initiatives. Regarding institutions from the European Union member countries, the project participants initiated several hundreds of contacts to AOD institutions intheir own countries and the neighboring countries, in order to motivate them to submit their websites to the catalogue. Moreover, contacting formed part of the user consulting and the evaluation of the gateway prototype.
Additional contacts were part of the project promotion activities, informing ca. 6.000 AOD addresses through the EU and in the CEECs. Concerning institutions from the CEECs accessing and candidate countries, contacts were created and extended during the project in order to extend the project working group, to ensure coverage of these countries and to integrate institutions within the AOD field to the scientific community on a continuous level.
Institutional networking: As described above, the project has proven to be a suitable base to enhance cross-institutional networking. This outcome is provided by the fact that regular updating of the catalogue triggers continous activities by contributors from all regions of the European community. Thus, the gateway project because ideally links a growing and changing number of institutional and non-institutional actors within a continuous cross-national networking process.
Moreover, the results contribute to establish a base for institutional contacts and cooperation: The gateway catalugue provides knowledge about institutions publishing on the internet, their work contexts, missions and scope of activities and thus enhances transparency within a multidisciplinary working field through Europe. Knowledge about the current state of arts related to AOD working areas is being provided in a global perspective, as mirrored in activities and publications presented on the internet and available in a systematical structured context.
Cross-European information transfer: The gateway project has enhanced the accessibility of internet based AOD information through Europe, with a coverage of 32 countries and 824 institutions. All resources available within the catalogue have been revised and evaluated by AOD information specialists. Thus, the credibility and quality of the information promoted by the gateway is at a high level. Moreover, the project has developed related methodologies and tools, and guidelines for evaluation and selection of high quality resources within the thematic scope of alcohol, drugs and addiction. Thus, the gateway can be considered as an appropriate technology to disseminate specific information within the community of professionals in the health field.
Another benefit from the project activities concerns the information specialists involved in the creation of the gateway. Added value to the participating libraries has been achieved in terms of discovery and monitoring of web-based publication resources to enrich their collections, especially at a time where publishing is increasingly done in digital environments.
4.2. Future maintenance strategy
Given the high rate of fluctuation and growth on the www, a continous strategy is necessary to update the gateway catalogue content, in order to secure the work and budgetary investments of the years 2002-2003. During a gateway Phase II workshop held in Dublin on 24 September 2003, members of the ELISAD network have developed a distributed maintenance mechanism, which functions on a voluntary base (cf Annex 22: Dublin protocol).
The main principles for future maintenance and updating are summarised below.
4.2.1. Extension of the gateway working group
During the phase 2002-2003, 8 countries were involved in the work programme, including France, Germany, United Kingdom, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Netherlands, Czech Republic and two European associations (cf 2.1.4.). All phase 1 group members will furtheron engage to maintain the gateway.
Since the Dublin workshop, new participants from 8 countries have joined the gateway project group and confirmed their cooperation with the former phase 1 group members, including Lithuania, Poland, Ireland, Norway, Serbia, Slovenia, Greece, Austria.
The remaining geographical gaps have been located for the following 12 countries:
Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Portugal, Romania, Switzerland, Finland, Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegowina and Croatia. It is anticipated that the latter 4 countries can temporarily be managed by the Serbian participant.
Nevertheless, the extended project group network is able to furtheron maintain a broad coverage focus. The big range of countries includes more than ½ of Europe and can rely on 16 participants approaching the coming 2004-2005 working phase. All these members have defined their cooperation within the gateway project context in official agreements towards the Elisad association.
4.2.2. Working principles: distributed data collection and mentorship
Joint performance of the maintenance mechanism is based on a clear specification of tasks and scopes according to agreed guidelines for all project related work contributions :
- data collection including continuous identification, review, listing and description of websites, translation of records from original language to English,
- networking activities and communications within the group and with further institutions,
- website and database maintenance, data edition and language proofreading.
Within the voluntary work process, websites to be added will undergo a quality selection and priority guidelines. From the vast amount of emerging websites, those considered to be useful resources, will be listed "in progress" to the catalogue, including title, publisher, URL and country. These basic data are complemented by the contributor´s name in order to identify and administrate the records.
Moreover, several participants agreed to contribute a limited number of full records each month to the gateway. This procedere will ensure the regular adding of descriptions for the most important websites in many countries, and thereby achieve a basic degree of updating.
The phase 1 group of ancient participants applies the mentorship principle in order to survey methodological suitability and quality of project contributions in 3 steps:
1) deliverance of the first 3 full records using the offline tool by the new cooperator,
2) feedback and exchanges facilitated by mentors to new cooperators, in order to provide methodical training on telematic way
3) achievement of required quality level followed by password access to the online tools for data input and edition.
A core team consisting of Elisad, Archido, Toxibase and Drugscope will cover central functions such as monitoring, database hosting, drafting of the future concept for application and identification of further funding sources.
4.2.3. Perspectives to achieve continuity and needs for support
A need for additional resources has been identified in order to cope with the enormous growth in the field of AOD websites which can hardly be covered by voluntary work, especially given the budget cuts and difficult situation of AOD libraries in Europe, as lined out in the ELISAD declaration 2002 (cf. elisad.org ).
This concerns especially personal working time ressources for translation, edition, technical administration and data collection for all institutions involved. Needs for financial support are especially applicable in the CEECs countries to support resources and languages.
Ideally, a continous support on national/governmental or European level would secure an accurate, more extensive updating of the gateway catalogue which can better correspond to the real growth and changes of web resources and related time amounts for updating, and should successively increase to keep up with the developmental tendency of the world wide web.
Future extension of the gateway is depending on financial support to cover workload and technical needs. Provided a funded context for the working phase 2004-2005, several options for extension and refinement have been identified. Main objectives will focus on the geographical scope of central and Eastern Europe, on technical refinement of the functions available, and the development of multilinguality of the catalogue and user interfaces.
Other tasks would include the systematic continuation of data collection for all European countries in order to achieve the highest possible degree of catalogue content actuality, and to enhance partnership with comparable gateways and information networks in the health field by further developing the gateway communication strategy.
4.3.1. Extension of geographical scope: focus on Eastern and Central Europe
The current state of arts, as reflected in the AOD website lanscape, leads to the expectation that internet resources will strongly extend in the near future in the Central and Eastern European countries.
In the same time, research has given evidence that the language barrier means a high threshold between CEECs and the western European countries, a fact complemented by the cyrillc typography, cultural differences and the still developing state of institutional networking between institutions.
Thus, a central future project objective must be to strengthen the scope towards Eastern and Central European involvement to the project. This means to support performance of the new project group participants, and the identification of addictional CEECs participants to cover the remaining countries.
Systematic inclusion of CEECs institutions to the networking process, and systematic efforts in data collection for CEECs websites in the AOD field will enable information transfer and exchange through Europe, and thus correspond to obvious needs of professionals in the field. Initiated on such base of cross-European collaboration, further possibilities for cooperation and joint projects are likely to arise and lead to a benefit for all participants and for institutional website publishers. As a result, the use of the gateway will facilitate contacts between AOD professionals.
Data collection within the CEECs must include the revision and completion of the records available by end 2003, which include 26 full records and 78 listed records from 14 countries, by now encomprising 12,6% of the total data amount (cf. 3.1.3.) to reach about 30% of the total catalogue content.
As a result of the 2002-2003 working phase, the gateway catalogue and user interfaces provide multiple ways of database processing and retrieval. Although providing a useful base, the functions implemented to date will have to undergo revision and improvement in order to cope with the growing catalogue content.
The anticipated future needs for refinements address technical processing of the database and the refinement of retrieval functions, as enumerated below.
Adaption and refinement of database processing
Automation of the updating with a common intelligent search software which is able to identify broken links and changes of contents within the recorded websites. Such a tool would secure a systematical updating of the catalogue by technical means, subsequent to a suitable choice for configuration and the entering of all existing records to this scheme
Revision and simplification of the database format where appropriate, and implementation of automated administration tools, corresponding to the growing size and extended features of the database.
Revision and extension of the keywords index based on the invisible data entries in the freetext fields in order to meet with the available website contents identified and described. This procedere would imply the extension of browsing options available via the subject categories provided in the user interface
Revision and extension of the subject browsing categories to include additional items, based on a detailed statistical monitoring system indicating the most frequently accessed features. If appropriate, the scope of browsing categories is extensible to include formal information, such as e.g. types of information, or institutions and organisations in the AOD field.
With the growing catalogue content, the development for a quality filter for the best web sites will be necessary to indicate and/or annotate results of major quality as an editor´s recommendation to the user.
Refinement of retrieval functions
Development of a thematic glossary in order to facilitate and optimise search results. The search glossary is planned to include synonyms for the subject specific keyword terms, such as e.g. marihuana, hashish for cannabis or XTC for ecstasy. Following the revision process within the existing full records, the implementation of the search glossary needs to be programmed to refine the free and advanced search modi and result filters
Development and implementation of a "basket" function to save individually selected results from repeated browsing and searches, in order to enable users to work with the records of interest after several steps of inquiry
Subsequent actualisation of the present layout will be necessary to meet the additional functions implemented and to display the retrieval options in a clear structure
Within the conception process, it is expected that additional options for technical refinement will be identified.
4.3.3. Multilinguality and translation matters
To date, the gateway provides English languaged descriptive metadata within English user interfaces for multilingual resources. Possibilities to achieve future multilinguality of the gateway information service include the translation of the general user interfaces and catalogue content to additional European languages. Examples for language extension include French, German, Spanish, Russian and the choice of a widespread Scandinavian language.
Matters of translation can include the following options:
translation of the user interfaces and the keywords index
translation of the catalogue content, including the translation of records into additional EU languages, and/or inclusion of all records in original language and English
inclusion of formal metadata in original language (OL), e.g. addition of OL keywords and OL title
development and implementation of a multilingual retrieval system including OL keywords and the languages of the user interfaces and catalogue content, based on the multilingual keywords index and a multilingual glossary
4.3.4. Conclusions on the 2002-2003 working programme results
The gateway can be considered as a suitable and valuable tool for cross-European networking based on information transfer and exchange. Being an unique resource, the catalogue content represents the working areas, current activities and institutions in the AOD field for 32 countries and in various related topics. Having overpassed its formerly estimated scope of work, and doubling the participants involved to the group, the project work programme has been especially successful.
The principle of continous maintenance by participants from all regions of the European community supports the specific added value of the gateway project: It ideally links a growing and changing number of institutional and non-institutional actors within a continuous cross-national networking process. Thus, the ongoing aliveness of the gateway project is an essential precondition for its benefits to AOD professionals. This procedure can be called an "active users"-principle where those who provide input also profite from the resources provided by others contributions: "you get what you give".
Since maintenance of the catalogue on voluntary base is possible but limited, it can be concluded that invention of a continuous support structure is strongly recommended for the coming years in order to secure the achievements, and to maintain actuality on a suitable level, coping with the rapid growth and fluctuation on the web.
ELISAD European Gateway on Alcohol and other Drugs / Final Research and Activity Report December 2003
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