About the Site 
Subject gateway approach
The subject gateway approach has been adopted for the development of this health information website aimed at NHS staff and the wider healthcare community in Glasgow. Given the plethora of health information, often of poor quality, available on the Internet, this approach is of particular relevance in its ability to offer a healthcare audience quick access to resources which have been selected for relevance and quality. Fundamental to this approach are the key components of subject structure, resource description and cataloguing outlined below. This structured method in turn provides great flexibility for the end-user in its capacity to offer a wide range of simple and advanced search and browse options and access points.
A review of the literature and state of the art of information gateways on the Internet was undertaken to inform the project team of current developments and trends. Based on this review, a framework for the development of GHI content as a subject gateway was developed which considered the following issues to be of importance:
-
Subject structure: a subject structure is an essential component in developing a quality subject gateway based on which resources can be described in a standard and consistent manner. To this end we utilised the US National Library of Medicine's MeSH thesaurus as a standard controlled vocabulary which is sufficiently detailed and covers the GHI subject scope.
-
Metadata: resource description and discovery based on standard metadata format is viewed as a key element in internet-based information services. Having reviewed a wide range of metadata formats, the GHI team decided to adopt the Dublin Core metadata format since it was widely recognised and extensively utilised in a large number of information gateways. A number of modifications were made in order to meet the specific requirements of GHI. These included adding extra elements for NHS Audience, Resource Types and Sub Resource Type, and Sector of Origin. GHI Metadata Master document available in MS Word format (59K).
-
Cataloguing: guidelines for cataloguing and indexing of resources should be established in order to ensure consistent resource description. The GHI cataloguing guidelines are mainly based on Nancy Olson's Cataloguing Internet Resources: A Manual and Practical Guide, and ROADS Cataloguing Guidelines while guidelines developed by other subject gateways were also taken into consideration. Cataloguing rules for GHI available in MS Word format (88K).