The NIH Library bioinformatics portal: Web analytics and social networking middleware

Wednesday, October 26, 2011 — Poster Session III
10:00 a.m. – Noon	Natcher Conference Center	OD	RSCHSUPP-16

Authors

• L Young
• M Bhagwat

Abstract

In response to a survey of NIH scientists, the NIH Library Bioinformatics Support Program was initiated, prompting the launch of an accompanying Web portal (http://nihlibrary.nih.gov/bioinformatics). The development of this portal included analysis of its usage and engineering of a dynamic list of bioinformatics resources and tools for molecular biologists and clinicians. The structure of the Web portal reflects the services offered by the support program: training, consulting, software licensing, and online resources. These sections contain information regarding class schedules and software license registration, including software for pathway analysis, microarray analysis, and next gen sequencing data analysis. Also included is a link to “Computational Molecular Biology at NIH and Beyond” which is a bioinformatics resources Web site (http://nihlibrary.nih.gov/molbio). We recently took over this Web site, originally generated by the Helix group at CIT. With the plethora of new resources appearing every day, maintaining such a Web site with manual editing is difficult. To address this problem, we used the “Delicious” social bookmarking feeds and APIs as middleware to rebuild and keep these Web pages current. Finally, we used Woopra to analyze the usage of the portal for the purpose of improving access to the wealth of information provided there.

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