[CISMeF: catalog and index of French-speaking medical sites]

The Internet has now become a major source of health information. The aim of CISMeF is to catalogue and index the main French-speaking sites and documents concerning health. This project was initiated by Rouen University Hospital. Its URL is http://www.chu-rouen.fr/cismef. CISMeF covers all areas of health care and medical sciences, and is indexed both alphabetically and according to subject. It was set up on a Sun workstation under the Sun UNIX operating system and is entirely based on static HTML. By May 1999, the number of sites and documents indexed was already over 6,500, with a mean of 75 new sites added each week. CISMeF is updated via a five-step process: resource collection, filtering, description, classification, and indexing. The Net Scoring criteria are used to assess the quality of health information on the Internet. These criteria concern eight categories: credibility, content, links, design, interactivity, quantitative aspects, ethics and accessibility. CISMeF uses two standard tools to organize information: the MeSH (medical subject heading) thesaurus from the Medline reference database (National Library of Medicine, USA) and the Dublin core metadata format. The sites and documents included in CISMeF are described using the following elements from the Dublin core project: title, author or creator, subject and keywords, description, publisher, date, resource type, format, identifier, and language.