Distributed search in National Electronic Library for Health

Modern healthcare specialists are overwhelmed by the volume of medical information available on the Internet However, they cannot always find what they need when they need it. The UK National Electronic Library for Health (NeLH) is addressing this issue by providing a single-entry portal to evidence-based medical information on the Internet enhanced with a quality tag assigned by professional experts. In order to fully utilize the potential of an Internet-based library, the NeLH is distributed and consists of a number of Virtual Branch Libraries (VBLs), each dedicated to a particular disease or a medical area. VBLs are dynamically updated and their design reflects the needs of each particular user base. However, users accessing a single VBL may want to search the entire NeLH or should have the option of being able to search the entire NeLH. Therefore, support for a distributed search according to an adopted topology of VBL servers is essential. In this paper, we present an agent-based solution to distributed search based on a star topology of the NeLH.