A rural virtual health sciences library project: research findings with implications for next generation library services*

Purpose: The Shared Hospital Electronic Library of Southern Indiana (SHELSI) research project was designed to determine whether access to a virtual health sciences library and training in its use would support medical decision making in rural southern Indiana and achieve the same level of impact seen by targeted information services provided by health sciences librarians in urban hospitals.

HUNT: launch of a full-length cDNA database from the Helix Research Institute

The Helix Research Institute (HRI) in Japan is releasing 4356 HUman Novel Transcripts and related information in the newly established HUNT database. The institute is a joint research project principally funded by the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry, and the clones were sequenced in the governmental New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) Human cDNA Sequencing Project. The HUNT database contains an extensive amount of annotation from advanced analysis and represents an essential bioinformatics contribution towards understanding of the gene function. The HRI human cDNA clones were obtained from full-length enriched cDNA libraries constructed with the oligo-capping method and have resulted in novel full-length cDNA sequences. A large fraction has little similarity to any proteins of known function and to obtain clues about possible function we have developed original analysis procedures. Any putative function deduced here can be validated or refuted by complementary analysis results. The user can also extract information from specific categories like PROSITE patterns, PFAM domains, PSORT localization, transmembrane helices and clones with GENIUS structure assignments. The HUNT database can be accessed at http://www.hri.co.jp/HUNT.