Rod Ward

Rod Ward is a nurse with a clinical background in accident and emergency. He now works as a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Health and Social Care at the University of the West of England, Bristol, specialising in health informatics.

Rod put his first page on the World Wide Web in 1992. It developed into "Nursing and health Care Resources on the Net" the following year and ran until 2001. It was then subsumed into NMAP, the UK's gateway to high quality Internet resources for Nurses, Midwives and Allied Professions, for which he became project manager.

Rod has a long-standing interest in the use and management of information for healthcare via the Net and speaks and writes widely on related issues. He is currently leading a team of researchers examining attitudes to IT amongst health care staff and manages Informaticopia, a collaborative blog providing eclectic news and views on health informatics issues at http://www.rodspace.co.uk/blog/blogger.html

For further information and a full CV see: http://www.rodspace.co.uk

Synopsis

Human Quality Assurance for Web Resource Catalogues

The use of human beings, rather than software devices, for the identification, evaluation, description and cataloguing of Internet resources has advantages and disadvantages. These will be explored using the example of the BIOME gateway of the Resource Discovery Network, which holds over 30,000 live records including the OMNI and NMAP gateways for medical, nursing and allied health students and academics. The evaluation process will be described and issues about the use of subject experts or information professionals will be discussed taking into account maintenance and cost effectiveness issues. Current changes to the Resource Discovery Network, into Intute, and its likely implications will also be touched upon.