Press release - Hub for Health, Medical and Life Sciences

[John Kirriemuir]

Press Release
For Immediate Release

Following on from the announcement made by one of our sister gateways
(EEVL: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/lis-elib/1999-06/0025.html), soon
to be a Hub (in this context, an enlarged gateway carrying a wider range
of supplementary services), we wish to announce:

			BIOME
		   "The Living Hub"

Looking for quality resources in the health, medical and life sciences?
BIOME will cover plants, animals, patients, agriculture, pharmaceutical 
sciences, medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary sciences, agriculture,
forestry information, the natural world, clinical sciences, and much, much
more...

BIOME will build on the experiences, skills and content of the established
OMNI service (providing half a decade of biomedical informatics services),
and expand to cover all areas within the health, life and medical
sciences. 

The service will be coordinated by the University of Nottingham, where
OMNI is based, and will be a Hub within the Resource Discovery Network
(RDN). The service will be consortium based, and OMNI is joined by a
formidable range of high profile partners and content providers from the 
UK health, medical and life science sectors. These are:

- the Natural History Musuem, who will also host the Natural World
component of the service
- CTI Biology, at the University of Liverpool
- the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons
- Oxford University
- Reading University
- BRIL - the BBSRC Research Insitutes Librarians organisation
- the Royal Free Hospital

These partners will bring invaluable subject-based skills, expertise and
profile, and are already participating in the development of BIOME.

More details are available at:
http://omni.ac.uk/newsletter/issue26/rdnc/

To enable us to provide this enlarged service, new staff will be taken on
board to complement the existing skills and experience. If you wish to
work for a high profile, quality-based electronic information service,
then keep an eye on adverts appearing over the next few weeks, either on
relevant mailing lists or on the OMNI site. Positions in management,
technical and content provision and maintenance roles will become
available.

In addition, people, institutions or organisations who may wish to give 
either content, or generously provide supplementary funding or financial
donations, are welcome to contact us:

Enquiries:		webmaster at omni.ac.uk
Funding/donations:	funding at omni.ac.uk

BIOME will be represented at the UmbrelLA 5 Conference:
http://www.la-hq.org.uk/umbrella5
Check out the delegates noticeboard at the event for further details.

For further details on the Resource Discovery Network, contact Mr Lorcan
Dempsey:
Email:	l.dempsey at ukoln.ac.uk
Web:	http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/l.dempsey.html



John Kirriemuir,
OMNI Service Manager

===============================================
BIOME: "Because a Hub is for life, not just for
	Higher Education"