The Online Bioinformatics Resources Collection at the University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences Library System--a one-stop gateway to online bioinformatics databases and software tools

Abstract

To bridge the gap between the rising information needs of biological and medical researchers and the rapidly growing number of online bioinformatics resources, we have created the Online Bioinformatics Resources Collection (OBRC) at the Health Sciences Library System (HSLS) at the University of Pittsburgh. The OBRC, containing 1542 major online bioinformatics databases and software tools, was constructed using the HSLS content management system built on the Zope Web application server. To enhance the output of search results, we further implemented the Vivísimo Clustering Engine, which automatically organizes the search results into categories created dynamically based on the textual information of the retrieved records. As the largest online collection of its kind and the only one with advanced search results clustering, OBRC is aimed at becoming a one-stop guided information gateway to the major bioinformatics databases and software tools on the Web. OBRC is available at the University of Pittsburgh's HSLS Web site (http://www.hsls.pitt.edu/guides/genetics/obrc).

Figure 1

The screenshot of a sample record display of OBRC.

Figure 2

(a) The screenshot of the first page results for the testing query ‘transcription factor or factors’ from searching the OBRC using the Zope^®-based search engine coupled with the Vivísimo Clustering Engine^®. (b) The expanded view of the major clusters of the search results.