The National Institutes of Health Library and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Office of Communications and Government Relations are collaborating to create a 'Pandemic Influenza Digital Archives' using Drupal. This site will showcase a collection of thousands of scholarly publications from the 9th century to present on pandemics and epidemics, especially the 1918 pandemic influenza, to serve the needs of virologists and researchers worldwide. The summary provides examples of other virtual research environments built with technologies like Islandora and the Science Collaboration Framework.
2. Disclaimer These slides represent the work and opinions of the presenter and do not constitute official positions of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS). References to any specific commercial products by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by NIH or HHS.
3. Introduction The National Institutes of Health Library and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Office of Communications and Government Relations (OCGR) are collaborating on the creation of a 'Pandemic Influenza Digital Archives'. This collaborative web site will showcase Dr. David Morens' core collection of several thousand scholarly publications spanning the 9th century AD to the present on various aspects of all pandemics and large scale epidemics, especially the 1918 pandemic influenza. Using the open source software Drupal, are creating a world-class pandemic influenza digital archive, serving the needs of virologists and researchers around the world.
Thank you for allowing me a few minutes to talk about the amazing work that happens at the National Institutes of Health Library and the small role that I’ve been able to play this year.
Here’s the big picture of our effort and the focus of my talk today. In response to the health community’s critical need for an accessible, centralized source for historical influenza data, the NIH Library and NIAID have partnered to build the Pandemic Influenza Digital Archive. This collection will serve as the starting point for a comprehensive and vital pandemic influenza digital archive. The goal is to facilitate the ability of scientists and researchers, both within and outside NIH, to collaborate, explore and respond to current issues and ideas; and to acquire a deeper understanding of pandemic influenza.
It became apparent that this pandemic influenza project needed more than a good bibliographic database, it also needed strong collaboration tools to support the creation of a community around this historical topic. The recent outbreak of pandemic influenza brought additional focus to this effort and also showcased some new ways to present pandemic-related data.As we researched a solution, Virtual Research Environments sounded like a good direction for our effort. The UK-based JISC, which is funding its third round of research efforts around Virtual Research Environments, says “The purpose of a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) is to help researchers from all disciplines to work collaboratively by managing the increasingly complex range of tasks involved in carrying out research on both small and large scales.”We also discovered Islandora which is “an open source project underway at the Robertson Library at the University of Prince Edward Island which combines the Drupal and Fedora software applications to create a robust digital asset management system that can be used for any requirement where collaboration and digital data stewardship are critical.”Even more specifically, we learned that the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University have teamed up to build a software toolkit on Drupal called the Science Collaboration Framework (SCF) to ease the development of web-based virtual teams with rich collaborations tools for researchers in biomedicine. stembook.org and Parkinsons Disease Online are two popular examples of this toolkit in action.We determined that a Virtual Research Environment was the best solution for this project and that Drupal was the most advanced platform to build it upon.