Cristina Fraga-Medín

Jorge Veiga de Cabo

Laura Mohedano-Macías

Virginia Jiménez-Planet

Fraga-Medín, Cristina

Jiménez-Planet, Virginia

Mohedano-Macías, Laura

Veiga de Cabo, Jorge

Hemeroteca Cientifica Catalana

PERSPECTIVES The Virtual Health Libraryof Spain: a tool to accessand disseminatescientific and technicalknowledge on healthIntroductionThe project “Virtual Health Library” [http://bvs.isciii.es] isthe result of technical cooperation between the Pan AmericanHealth Organization of the World Health Organization(PAHO/WHO) through its Latin American and CaribbeanCenter on Health Sciences Information, previously calledRegional Library of Medicine (BIREME), [http://www.bireme.br], and other national and regional institutions ofLatin America and the Caribbean. Each participant country,through its Coordinator Centre, develops its own VHL andall of them belong to the VHL network, coordinated byBIREME. The Spanish National Library of Health Sciences(Biblioteca Nacional de Ciencias de la Salud, BNCS) fromCarlos III Health Institute (Instituto de Salud Carlos III,ISCIII, http://www.isciii.es), is the Coordinator Centreresponsible for developing the Virtual Health Library inSpain. One of the added values of these libraries is the qual-ity of the available information. All sources are selected fol-lowing strict quality criteria. Another characteristic is that allVirtual Health Libraries use the same interface and searchengines to enhance their navigability.The Virtual Health Library (VHL) could be defined as atool to disseminate scientific and technical knowledge onhealth through the Internet. Its main aim is to promote thedevelopment and dissemination of scientific informationsources to be used by Governments, national health systems,research and educational institutions, health workers andanyone who may need this type of information. It gathers, inone website, different types of information resources onhealth. In addition, it guarantees the reliability, updating andquality of the information and it also provides universalaccess to this information through the Internet [2].To date, the Virtual Health Libraries Network is made upby 8 national VHLs (they gather and disseminate the scien-tific production generated in the country), 9 specific VHLs(they develop sources that gather the knowledge on a givenscientific field), 37 national initiatives (under development)and 13 regional initiatives (under development; they make uptools of several Latin-American and Caribbean countries).VHL-Spain offers free access to: National Databases(IBECS y BDIE), international databases (Medline,LILACS, PAHO), collective catalogues (SeCS and C17),Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO)-Spain andNet-SciELO® electronic publications, health terminologydatabases: (MeSH-DeCS, Health Sciences Descriptors), healthinformation locators (LIS-Spain: Healthy Sites), directories andother information resources, links to different VHLs by coun-tries or thematic areas, and publications released by VHL-SpainCristina Fraga-Medín*Virginia Jiménez-PlanetLaura Mohedano-MacíasJorge Veiga de CaboNational Library of Health Sciences,Carlos III Health Institute, Madrid,Spain  INTERNATIONAL MICROBIOLOGY (2005) 8:141-144www.im.microbios.org*Corresponding author:C. Fraga-MedínBiblioteca Nacional de Ciencias de la SaludInstituto de Salud Carlos IIISinesio Delgado, 8E-28029 Madrid, SpainTel. +34-913877779. Fax: +34-913877868 E-mail: cfraga@isciii.es142 INT. MICROBIOL. Vol. 8, 2005itself. The number of visits to the VHL-Spain website hasincreased dramatically from 587 visualizations of pages in 2002to 28,239 in 2003 and 45,655 in 2004.VHL-Spain (Virtual Health Library)main sources IBECS (Spanish Bibliographic Index on HealthSciences). This index collects and disseminates qualityliterature on health sciences published in Spain since 2000. Itincludes the contents of 146 high-quality journals from vari-ous health science fields, such as medicine, pharmacy, veteri-nary medicine, psychology, dentistry and nursing [4]. InMarch 2005 the database comprised 36,978 records. A tech-nical committee evaluates the journals to be accepted in theindex, according to pre-established quality control criteria.IBECS uses the methodology and thesaurus used also byother databases such as LILACS (Database of LatinAmerican Literature on Health Sciences) and MEDLINE,called LILDBI-DeCS. This tool increases the quality ofSpanish scientific journals and promotes them both in Spainand internationally.  IBECS is linked to SciELO (ScientificElectronic Library Online) and the science magazines direc-tory. When the icons of their respective websites appear in anIBECS record, the full text can be retrieved from SciELO andthe bibliographic record of the journal from the directory(Fig. 1 and Table1).DeCS (Health Sciences Descriptors). DECS is atrilingual thesaurus (English, Portuguese and Spanish) devel-oped by BIREME for the indexation of articles in scientificjournals, books, conferences proceedings, and technicalreports, which comprises terms on health sciences fields. It isbased on the translation of MeSH (Medical SubjectHeadings-National Library of Medicine, USA), to which twonew categories—Public Health, and Homeopathy—havebeen added. The work of the Spanish VHL site is the revision of cur-rent terms and the translation of new terms detected by theUS National Library of Medicine yearly. In 2004 the DeCScomprised 27,275 terms. Since 2003 the BNCS has reviewed4,561 terms and translated 1,151 new terms. This dynamicvocabulary is used in the VHL to index resources such asIBECS and LIS-Spain: Healthy Sites.Full text on books and bulletins. This tool providesfull and free access to scientific literature (42 books, 2 bul-letins, 12 reports and grey literature on health sciences in pdfformat). The information can be retrieved through a subjectindex or an alphabetic index.SciELO-Spain (Scientific Electronic LibraryOnline). This online library is a model of electronic pub-lishing that comprises a selected collection of Spanish scien-tific journals avaialable on the Internet. Its aims mainly toimplement an electronic virtual library, providing openaccess to a collection of serial titles, a collection of issuesfrom individual serial titles, as well as to the full text of arti-cles. The access to both serial titles and articles is availablevia indexes and search forms [1].Since its official presentation in Spain on October 2001, 17new journal titles have been added to the library collection,and the number of articles has also increased. The collection iscontinuously growing and, in April 2005, SciELO-Spain com-prises 3873 open-access articles from 21 Spanish medical jour-nals, and more journal titles are expected to come out soon.SciELO-Spain belongs to the SciELO network, whichgathers different SciELO sites (SciELO Chile, SciELOSpain, SciELO Cuba and SciELO Public Health) that share amethodology for the preparation, storage, dissemination andevaluation of scientific literature in electronic format. InFRAGA-MEDÍN ET AL.Fig. 1. Cover of Internet visible e invisible, by C. Bojo et al. [1]143INT. MICROBIOL. Vol. 8, 2005addition to the current SciELO sites, there are several initia-tives under development (Brazil Proceedings, Brazil Theses,Costa Rica, Mexico and Venezuela). In April 2005, theSciELO Network started providing open access to the fullcontents of 202 journals covering 18 subject matters.Portal of Scientific Journals. The main purpose ofthis scientific periodicals’ directory in the health sciences isto inform about the availability of open-access texts in elec-tronic format, and the way to access some of them.Information about the bibliographic description of titles, theaccess to electronic version (free, controlled or unavailable)and the libraries collections that cooperate with CollectiveCatalog SeCS can be found here. This portal is linked to theMEDLINE database.LIS-Spain: healthy sites (Health InformationLocator). This is a search engine specializing in healthwebsites selected following quality criteria. It offers adescription of the contents of the sites as well as their Internetlinks. The information can be retrieved through free search,using the advanced form and the index or directory that gath-ers the sources by subject matters and institutions. If we com-pare Google with LIS, their similarity is that both of them aresearch engines that have a search bar, but they differ in thefact that LIS focuses its search on health topics, selects web-sites according to quality criteria, and includes sources thatcannot be retrieved by traditional search engines. CurrentlyLIS has over 1000 information sources whose group of elec-tronic publications stands out.C17 and SeCS. C17 is a collective catalogue of serialpublications from health sciences Spanish libraries. It con-tains information about 530 health sciences libraries from the17 autonomous Spanish regions, including collections fromhospitals, universities, health councils, research centers andlaboratories (public health and pharmaceutical) libraries.SeCS (Serials on Health Sciences) is a database that listsjournal holdings available at BIREME and in libraries of theLatin American and Caribbean Health Sciences InformationSystem. It contains titles of journals that are indexed inMEDLINE and LILACS databases.New resources. In addition to updating the differenttools, the VHL-Spain develops and includes new resourceson a free and universal basis. The latest models are:• Evidence-Based Medicine (Spanish edition). VHL-Spain provides open full access to the online version ofthis journal in several formats. The whole 2004 collectionmade up of six issues is available.• Bibliographical Index on Safety and Health at Work.Bibliographic database that comprises the 1995–2000collection of the Boletín Bibliográfico de la Prevención.This bulletin is the Spanish translation of the Safety andHealth at Work, ILO-CIS Bulletin published by theNational Center CIS-Spain. It contains citations of docu-ments that deal with occupational accidents and diseasesas well as ways of preventing them. The types of docu-ments are: laws and regulations, chemical safety datasheets, training material, articles from serial publications,books, and standards.VIRTUAL HEALTH LIBRARYTable 1. Main databases to which VHL-Spain offers free access. (Information from [1])MEDLINE Database of abstracts maintained by the US National Library of Medicine containing over 8.4 million abstractsfrom 3,800+ medical journalsLILACS (“Literatura Latinoamericana y del Caribe en Ciencias de la Salud”). Database cooperative of the BIREMESystem, comprising the literature relative to health sciences published in Latin America the Caribbean since1982. It comprises articles from around 670 journals, with more than 150.000 entries, and theses, book chapters,proceedings from conferences, scientific and technical reports, and governmental publicationsPAHO (“Pan American Health Organization”) Database of bibliographical references and abstracts of the PAHO Libraryin Washington, DC, USASeCS (“Seriados en Ciencias de la Salud”) Journals database gathering the collections of BIREME and the librariesLatin American and Caribbean Network of Information in the Health Sciences. It comprises titles of journalsindexed in MEDLINE and LILACSBDIE (“Base de Datos para la Investigación en Enfermería”) Open access automated bibliographical database, onSpanish scientific production in nursery since 1990REPIDISCA Database of bibliographical references in health engineering and environmental sciences, coordinated by CEPIS(“Centro Panamericano de Ingeniería Sanitaria y Ciencias del Ambiente”), Lima, PeruDESASTRES Database generated by the Center for Documentation on Disasters of the PAHO and the World Health organiza-tion (WHO)WHOLIS World Health Organization library database. It indexes all WHO publications from 1948 onwards and articlesfrom WHO-produced journals and technical documents from 1985FRAGA-MEDÍN ET AL.that contribute both to disseminate and protect scientific pub-lications by allowing their universal access through theInternet, according to the Open Access Initiative [3]. References1. Bojo C, Fraga C, Hernández S, Jaén MB, Jiménez V, Mohedano L,Novillo A (2004) Internet visible e invisible: búsqueda y selección derecursos de información en ciencias de la salud. Instituto SaludCarlos III, Madrid2. Glen JW (2004) EASE Seminar: scientific publications in a digital age.Sessions 4-6. (Shortened version of presentation by Veiga de Cabo.J European Sci Editing 30:92-933. Guerrero R, Piqueras M (2004) Open access. A turning point in scientificpublication. Int Microbiol 7:157-1614. Veiga J (2001) La Biblioteca Virtual en Salud (BVS): Una apuesta porla difusión de la producción científica española y latinoamericana encolaboración con la OPS/OMS. Rev Esp Salud Pública 75:277-280Trends in the information on healthsciencesThese days, the overwhelming amount of health informationon the Internet may pose a problem to the scientific commu-nity, who needs to update their knowledge continuously andto access information regardless of the place of connection.Information managers must develop tools which can guaran-tee the reliability, updating and quality of the contents, andmake them available to health professionals. The SpanishNational Library of Health Sciences (BNCS) believes thatthe development of the Virtual Health Library of Spain andits incorporation into the VHL network have made it to be akey source in the access and dissemination of high-qualityscientific information from Latin America and Spain. TheBNCS will continue supporting initiatives and lines of workINT. MICROBIOL. Vol. 8, 2005144

The Virtual Health Library of Spain: a tool to access and disseminate scientific and technical knowledge on health

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The Virtual Health Library of Spain: a tool to access and disseminate scientific and technical knowledge on health

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