USAID Knowledge for Development: Reproductive Health Gateway
Description
To help organizations share their knowledge about reproductive health more effectively, the Population and Health Materials Working Group created a portal website that provides a search engine on reproductive health called Reproductive Health Gateway (www.rhgateway.org). Rather than search the entire contents of the Web, as you would do on Google, or search only the contents of one site, as you would for example on WebMD, RHGateway searches the contents of web sites that have been selected for accuracy, authority, and relevance. The web sites of many Working Group participants form the core of RH Gateway but it also includes other authoritative sites such as CDC and WHO. The Working Group reviews and selects other sites for inclusion on the basis of relevance and accuracy. Reproductive Health Gateway also provides other portal features such as links to related resources, a calendar of events, etc.
Value Proposition
An RHGateway search is much quicker, easier, and more trustworthy than either a Web-wide search, which can yield many irrelevant or unreliable sites, or a time-consuming site-by-site search. All queries are answered with links straight to the information the user is seeking, rather than to a description of that information. It is designed for international reproductive health professionals, program managers, researchers and students. Its goal is to provide quick, easy-to-use access to the most relevant body of scientific reproductive health information which is accessible via the World Wide Web.
Results
The result: quick access to the full contents of all documents on 66 sites including PDF files, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, etc. Searches can be conducted in 11 languages through both a simple single-box interface and an advanced query interface. Users who don't find what they are looking for on RHGateway, can repeat their search in four electronic databases whose content is not spidered by RHGateway: Development Experience Clearinghouse (DEC), Combined Health Information Database (CHID), POPLINE and PubMed (Medline). Or they can repeat the search on the entire web using the Inktomi search engine. RHGateway features new materials and resources related to reproductive health on its home page and on a "What's New" page. Users can sign up to receive a monthly e-mail update. Users who don't want to perform their own searches can search through a series of topics.
Issues
Plans are to develop the portal features by adding collaboration tools which would allow RHGateway users to create small groups to share knowledge, to set up listservs and threaded discussion groups, share files electronically, etc. We also plan to develop a combined publications ordering system which will allow RHGateway users to use a single interface to order publications from participating member sites - instead of having to visit 66 sites individually. We will continue to network with related portal sites such as Development Gateway. Replication/Scaling up: This type of portal risks becoming too big if it gets scaled up too much. Replication - by subject - is probably a better approach. The searching/spidering feature of RHGateway is somewhat unique on the web and it could easily be duplicated for other subjects such as environment, child survival, etc.
