Managing the electronic NIH-guide for grants and contracts

Abstract

This article describes the implementation of a suite of computer programs to manage and provide access to a database containing the electronic documents that constitute the NIH-Guide that is distributed by the NIH on a weekly basis. The software consists of a management program that reads, processes, and stores the incoming documents and performs erratum updates on existing documents; an alerting program that sends selected information to users who have registered their information needs; a viewer that can be used on the local computer to read these documents; and a World-Wide-Web (WWW) server that can distribute the guide to computers that run WWW client software. The design of the documentation annotations, the management software, and the WWW server are expected to constitute valuable models for similar projects in the future.