Standards to enhance interoperability of information systems and efficiency of information exchange.

Abstract

The Belgian Health Care Knowledge Centre (KCE) uses a lot of information sources in order to produce its HTA reports. LBI, an Austrian HTA agency, provides an institutional repository compliant to the OAI-PMH harvesting standard where HTA reports are published.

Thanks to the OAI client build in our library management system (PMB), we created a connector allowing to harvest automatically and on a regular basis the records from the LBI institutional repository.No additional human intervention is needed to add to the KCE library catalogue the description of LBI publications. When conducting a search within the KCE library catalogue, our scientists get a list of results describing documents published on the LBI institutional repository, simplifying the search process of HTA reports and ensuring an up to date research.

Embracing OAI standards for HTA reports repositories would allow to build a meta catalogue of HTA
reports that would be updated automatically. To participate to the achievement of this objective, KCE decided to add OAI server functionalities to her library catalogue where all KCE reports are described. This will allow any OAI clients to harvest the KCE repository and offer to their users the description of our reports and a link to the full-text as soon as they are published.