Tailoring WWW resources to the needs of your target group

Providing lists of internet resources comprises selecting data as well as structuring - classifying and categorizing - them. The Fraunhofer-Online team has provided a Fraunhofer-internal "virtual library" for 47 research institutes since 1995. So, how do we know what is relevant for a scientific community covering eight different research areas? And how do we make our data collections easy to use? To define relevance we use certain meta information, like the journals the institutes have subscribed to, or the conferences they attend. This approach also makes searching information on the World-wide Web much easier for us, since we simply can search for proper names instead of subjects described by combinations of keywords. As to structuring we provide two alternative methods to access our lists. One can either browse the subject headings corresponding to our eight research areas or categories like "Journals", "Publishers", "Organizations" etc. respectively. We do not explicitly rate any resources but we provide partly formalized descriptions. These depend on the category. In regard of research laboratories, for instance, we mention if there are publication lists, contact information, descriptions of current research projects, or descriptions of their technical equipment. As for links to journals we describe if there are archived data in addition to the current table of contents, or if abstracts are provided. Achieving a more flexible user interface will require applying database technology in the future. This will allow us to assign multiple classifications to references and to enable keyword searches. It also will reduce redundancy and thus make it easier to maintain the service.