Building the electronic health sciences library for the twenty-first century: the Galter Library experience

Constructing home pages for World-Wide Web access has become a major activity in academic health sciences libraries. At the Northwestern University, Galter Health Sciences Library staff are creating the library's new health information system using Web resources and integrating them with existing library systems-NUmed (OVID MEDLINE) and LUIS/NUcat (NOTIS). Development of Web pages, including selection and organization of electronic information, has become the building process for the electronic library. Selection, organization, design, and construction are important factors in the creation of an efficient and useful information system. Using resources like the World-Wide Web and tools like Netscape, library staff are designing an interface, defining policies and guidelines, and creating the tools that will give users easy access to local and international electronic, scholarly information resources. In this paper, the process used at Northwestern is shown as a model of an electronic health sciences library for the twenty-first century.