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| Health Protection Agency Culture Collections Website Goes Live The New Culture Collections website from the Health Protection Agency (HPA) has gone live on www.hpacultures.org.uk. The new e-commerce site brings together four, previously separate, culture collections into one domain and has been developed by specialist public sector web services company, System Associates. System Associates has provided design, content management, digital asset management, data integration, search, hosting, training and 24-hour support for the site. The project involved the integration of four separate databases, as well as the integration of a customer database for online ordering. More than 40,000 cell lines, bacteria, viruses or fungi can now be accessed via the site and are typically purchased by hospitals, universities and laboratories to further medical research. Users of the site are able to browse by several different search criteria, including A-Z browsing, via reference number, name, type of culture, or culture associated with a specific part of the body, or ailment. A search will retrieve the most relevant information about a culture, as well as useful papers and resources associated with that culture. David Macken, managing director of System Associates comments: "By far the most sophisticated aspect of this project has been to provide a meaningful retrieval on a complex subject-matter. There are 11 different search criteria, each of which relates to the indexing of more than 40,000 items." Helping to facilitate this retrieval is System Associates' content management and digital asset management software, which makes it as easy as possible to add and cross-reference items to the collections. The content management system also has a versioning facility which allows content providers to edit documents, while old versions are still live, to ensure that each culture is available online, even when being updated. Registered users of the system can order cultures directly from the website and at present, the order is then passed to operations for dispatch. Phase II of the site will see the CRM, logistics and financial systems also integrated, to provide a seamless experience from ordering to dispatch. write your comments about the article :: © 2008 Computing News :: home page |