BioSites Update!

You may have noticed some recent activity in BioSites (http://www.library.ucsf.edu/biosites). BioSites, a listing of quality Internet resources in the biomedical sciences, is a collaborative project of regional Network member libraries and PSRML. Since the beginning of October, librarian Cathy Brown has been assisting PSRML in checking each of more than 600 BioSites content descriptions for currency. While BioSites catches dead links using Linkcheck, other changes continually take place in the volatile world of the web. Old URL's forward to new ones. The names of sites change, along with their contents, and so the titles and/or descriptions have to be updated.

Sites included in BioSites date back to 1996. Government sites have been the most volatile. Some have become privatized, while others have changed their names to reflect new responsibilities. Sites that link to a database that searches a particular collection are also regularly revised.

To date, two thirds of BioSites pages have been checked; over one hundred changes have been submitted to Julia Kochi, BioSites Manager at UCSF Library and Center for Knowledge Management. If a site has changed substantially, it is deleted and a new description is written and submitted. A site is deleted if it has become something totally different and no longer matches BioSites criteria, although this rarely happens. This review and updating process preserves BioSites' reputation as a valuable tool in locating evaluated biomedical information sites on the Internet.

Editor's note: Cathy Brown assisted PSRML on a temporary basis this past September and October. She has a permanent part-time appointment at the UCLA College Library and also works at the UCLA Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library Reference Division.

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