MANAGING THE ELECTRONIC NIH-GUIDE FOR GRANTS AND CONTRACTS

This article describes the implementation of a suite Of computer progr ams to manage and provide access to a database containing the electron ic documents that constitute the NIH-Guide that is distributed by the NIH on a weekly basis. The software consists of a management program t hat reads, processes, and stores the incoming documents and performs e rratum updates on existing documents; an alerting program that sends s elected information to users who have registered their information nee ds; a viewer that can be used on the local computer to read these docu ments; and a World-Wide-Web (WWW) server that can distribute the guide to computers that run WWW client software. The design of the document ation annotations, the management software, and the WWW server are exp ected to constitute valuable models for similar projects in the future .