Objective: One of the most common barriers to implement Evidence-Based Medicine
(EBM) in practice is the lack of a payable access to important sources of
medical information. The Belgian branch of the Cochrane Collaboration aims at
providing online access to relevant databases and full-text articles of several
high quality information sources for all Belgian health care practitioners. A
series of obstacles was experienced during the set-up of the project. These
common problems were inventoried.

Method: A joint venture was established between the Belgian branch of the
Cochrane Collaboration, International Visual Systems and the National Sickness
and Invalidity Insurance Institute (government). This partnership will lead to
an Electronic Library with a unique interface, which provides access to (1) a
Research Search Engine, (2) a Practice Search Engine, (3) an online helpdesk.
After a year of piloting, the Virtual Library is now ready to be used by health
care providers.

Results: Efforts were made to develop a portal site based on an OVID-layout.
The centralised database contains the most important evidence-based databases
and the full-text of the core medical journals. More than 1500 health care
practitioners from different disciplines use the library. Several disciplines
have a specific entry, which provides access to relevant specialised journals
and databases. Some of the more general problems in the development and the use
of the Library will be presented to assist other researchers in the set-up of
similar projects.

Conclusion: In order to bridge the gap between research results and decision
making the building of a national Electronic Library of Health Care should be
stimulated. Future attempts to optimise the Electronic Library should
concentrate on convincing information providers to adapt their products to
local information retrieval systems and providing information in the mother
tongue of the users.