Quality of Biomedical Libraries Webpages : a survey

It is widely known the great extent of Internet and its role as a vehicle for the information and knowledge, for this reason web sites should be designed to be accessible to all people (Universal design). In Italy recent provisions of law (Law n. 4, January 8, 2004) focused the attention on problems related to web sites accessibility and especially to those belonging to public administrations. In 2003 our Library joined the CABI project (Campaign for Accessibility of Libraries on the Web) and becoming more sensitive to the accessibility problem tried to develop its web pages according to international standards (W3C, WAI, etc.). A representative sample of the Italian Biomedical Libraries Homepages was selected and carefully examined in order to assess their compliance to accessibility standards. Different validation software were used to ensure a greater reliability to the survey and to evaluate several accessibility aspects and the priority level reached by web sites under study. The results are really not very encouraging and draw a current scene in which the main feature is represented by the fact that the sample achieved a low rate of accordance to the rules of accessibility stated by International standards. This may be considered as a symptom of a lacking sense to the problem. On the other hand it seems to be much more spread the trend to update web pages content rather than allow easier and faster accessibility.