The EAU has a new educational platform called UROsource, the learning library for urologists. The EAU library contains a searchable index of EAU conference proceedings, European Urology (EU) journals and EAU Guidelines. The searchable index is primarily from the millennium onwards. UROsource is internet accessible (https://uroweb.org/urosource/) and optimised across devices (desktop, tablet and mobile).
EAU members receive access to EAU guidelines, online courses, abstracts and EU articles and supplements. However, to get access to abstracts, posters, webcasts or video you have to have attended the respective meeting where the resources were presented. To make matters more complex, content that is more than 3 years old need an additional subscription to UROsource. Annual renewable subscriptions to UROsource are €95 for EAU members and €195 for non-members. Current EAU subscriptions are €120 for active urologists and €50 for residents (Checked in November 2015).
At the time of this review, November 2015, there are 47527 EAU library resources. However, more than 20000 of these are EU and Supplements articles, all of which are available through institutional access. There is also significant repetition through the site with abstracts and webcasts of posters being represented on the site despite essentially representing the same content.
The indexing system on the UROSource site work well overall and automatically remembers which conferences you have already attended to grant appropriate access to resources. However, not all aspects of the site searching, indexing and display are working at time of this review across all browsers. Additionally, there are significant gaps in the education platform. Currently this includes only 4 interactive e-courses (CME available), 25 course books, 4 hands-on training documents and only 16 live surgery sessions.
Conclusion
UROsource provides a resource platform where all of the EAU’s considerable resources have been made available across multiple devices. This should be useful to academics and when catching up on sections missed when attending an EAU organised meeting. However, it is a shame that an additional payment is required to access a fairly limited set of resources (courses, videos, webcasts and posters), especially to conferences where fees have previously been paid or to which EAU members have contributed. There is definitely room for improvement in the site design that currently does not work consistently across all internet browsers. The development priority should be more structured, topic centric, indexed content, which will make it a more rewarding lifelong educational platform for urologists.
Links
Author: Mr Ivo Dukic, Consultant Urological Surgeon, Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust