ANN ARBOR—Twenty-two academic medical centers in the Midwest have collaborated to provide a World Wide Web entry point to evaluated, annotated Internet health resources.

Founder and co-facilitator of the six-year-old HealthWeb is Pat Redman, head of information services at the Taubman Medical Library at the University of Michigan. “HealthWeb is an entry point to the Web for educational, research, and clinical purposes,” Redman says.

Keenly aware of the vast amount of health information available on the Internet and the difficulty in determining its validity and scientific authority, Redman and other health sciences staff began the grass-roots project which now includes 75 subject pages. HealthWeb’s guides for using electronic resources are designed to help health professionals and consumers use electronic resources more effectively. The guides come from a variety of sources, and provide some of the best information on the Web for locating, evaluating, and using health-related Internet and other electronic resources.

Redman is responsible for the Nursing subject page, which served as the prototype for the rest of HealthWeb. Students from U-M’s School of Information work on the project, with each responsible for different areas of the page. The students search the Internet for new material and submit their findings to Redman for approval before making additions to the page.

This U-M effort sports a distinctive maize and blue color scheme, as do the pages for Dentistry, Genetics, and Public Health also developed and maintained at U-M. Colors in each section of HealthWeb correspond to the colors of the university sponsoring the section, a detail that might not seem significant to someone outside academia, but that has great meaning for faculty and alumni.

HealthWeb can be accessed at http://healthweb.org.

HealthWebNursingDentistryhttp://healthweb.org