An efficient delivery of historical information for the Mendelian Inheritance in Man database.

The ability to manage information with regard to changes in a database is critical for quality control. This information can also provide audit trails about the time of the change and the person who made the change. In addition, historical information can provide the proper context in which to interpret the relationships between the current and past data. In most genomic databases, only the most recent copy of the information is presented to the user, thereby losing the audit trail and the historical context. Therefore, we have constructed a delivery mechanism for the historical information in the Mendelian Inheritance in Man database. Furthermore, this feature was designed to optionally display only the changes so that the user can bypass the unchanged portions of the text. It was anticipated that technical problems would influence the acceptance of this information delivery. However, the involvement of the editorial staff became the critical factor.