Developments in European information issues: Networks and relays – Services – Products, February 1999

Online 98

The European Union Online User Meeting was held as usual at the Hilton, London on the morning of Wednesday 9 December but was perhaps more interesting for what was not said rather than what was. There was no representation from Eurobases or ECHO and no statement about the future of EU databases was made. It would seem that the changes are simply going to happen by default.

Among the projects which were discussed at the meeting, Ergo is of potential interest to those involved in R&D. Launched at Online 98 for the UK, the European Research Gateway On-line aims to be a one-stop shop for R&D project information. It was first made accessible in July 1998 on the CORDIS web site athttp://www.cordis.lu/ergo/ and stems from a pilot project begun in 1996. Currently thirteen contributors, including database hosts in countries outside the EU, have combined to offer their data free of charge through the one access point, covering records at present for over 81,000 projects - a wider scope than simply using the CORDIS databases. There is a basic search form on the initial screen with a link to a more advanced search facility. Boolean search operators AND, OR and NOT can be used but the AND operator is assumed between two words if not entered. Double inverted commas must be used to search for phrases. The default option searches across all the databases but it is also possible to specify particular ones, while the display format offers the option of short or detailed output with an easy link from the short version for more information. Though not all the contributors who have agreed to participate have so far made their data available it is to be hoped that the number of contributors will expand considerably to make this a valuable research resource.