LDBLibrary & Documentation Base
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WWW Virtual Library: Public Health

The Public Health section continues the tradition of the WWW Virtual Library: Public Health, one of the oldest subject directories on the web. It gathers authoritative public-health resources — international agencies, journals, and topic and country guides — with links reviewed and dead entries removed.

The WWW Virtual Library was the web's first catalogue — begun in the early 1990s by the people who built the web itself — and its method has aged well. Instead of ranking pages by algorithm, a subject specialist gathered, checked and annotated the resources that genuinely mattered in a field, so a reader could see the shape of the literature at a glance. The Public Health node followed that model, and this library carries it forward: the entries below are organised, the dead links of the original directory have been pruned, and current authoritative sources have been verified in their place.

Browse by subject

The topic guides cover the breadth of public health — women's health, child and adolescent health, occupational and environmental health, global and international health, health and bioethics, the health of indigenous peoples, and a directory of public-health journals. Each guide points to the international agencies, research institutions and publications working in the area.

Browse by region

The geographic guides collect public-health resources country by country — national health authorities and the relevant World Health Organization regional offices — across Asia, the Americas, Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, Oceania and Africa. A separate node continues the WWW Virtual Library: Circumpolar Peoples, on the health and communities of the Arctic.

Why a curated directory still matters

Search engines are good at finding a page when you already know what you are looking for. A curated subject directory does something different: it shows you the structure of a field — which institutions are authoritative, how the topics divide, where the primary data lives — so that someone new to public health can orient themselves quickly. That was the value of the original Virtual Library, and it is the value this section tries to preserve.

The links are kept honest. The original directory accumulated thousands of entries over the years, many of which have since gone offline as institutions reorganised their websites; those dead links have been removed rather than left to rot, and in their place the guides point to current, stable sources — the World Health Organization and its regional offices, national health authorities, the major journals and databases, and the established research bodies in each field. The result is smaller than the original sprawl, but every entry should resolve to something real.

In this section

Resources

Each entry links to an external institution, agency or publication. Listings are reviewed periodically: entries that no longer resolve are removed, and current authoritative sources are added in their place. For the wider collection, see the Public Health Library and the Indigenous Peoples section.

Last reviewed April 8, 2026.