Chalon P. X. Standards to enhance interoperability of information systems and efficiency of information exchange, 7th HTAi Annual Meeting, Dublin (Ireland), June 6-9 2010 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.

1. Standards to enhance
interoperability of information systems and
efficiency of information exchange
Patrice CHALON
Case
http://eprints.hta.lbg.ac.at/cgi/oai2 http://kce.docressources.info/opac/
GNU EPrints PMB
OAI-PMH *
• Scientists search the
KCE library catalogue,
within a list of relevant
(subsets of)
repositories selected
by their information
specialists
• Scientists get results in
the KCE library
catalogue
• A link points to the full-
text hosted by the
producing agency
(*) The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata • Settings must be
Harvesting (OAI-PMH) provides an application-independent verified to avoid
interoperability framework based on metadata harvesting. inconsistency
Conclusion Vision
• Using OAI standards allows interoperability, however
implementation must be carefully done.
Imagine… all HTA agencies
• Search is simplified: scientists search the KCE library store their HTA reports in a
catalogue to get a list of results describing documents repository compliant to OAI-
published externally, including the LBI institutional PMH
repository
• Meta data are encoded once by the producing
• Publications are better disseminated: description (meta agency
data) is available as soon as a report is published
• Meta catalogues are automatically updated and
• KCE will activate the OAI server functionalities of its allow to search all documents at once
library catalogue and register her repository to repertories
and meta repositories • Some meta catalogues provide additional
content
Contact Acknowledgments Links
Patrice.Chalon@kce.fgov.be Guba Beate (formerly LBI-HTA), http://www.eprints.org/
Belgian Health Care Knowledge Centre (KCE) Luc Hourlay (KCE) , Tarquin
http://www.sigb.net
http://kce.fgov.be Mittermayr (LBI-HTA),
Dominique Roberfroid (KCE) http://www.openarchives.org/