Subject gateways can be defined as quality controlled information services, produced by a public or private organism, that operate through the Web, and that work on the localization, selection, and description of Internet based resources, following a methodology and established quality criteria. The aim is to facilitate information search and recovery to their users, generally linked to the academic world.

The following characteristics have been marked as distinctive of a subject gateway face to simple collections of links:

It is an online service that provides links to web sites or documents in Internet.
The selection is done by an intellectual process according to a quality policy within the audience information needs.
It produces subject descriptions since each item is catalogued in old or minor depth.
The order or structure follows a scheme or classification that facilitates navigation.
Each resource is assigned a series of metadata.

All these operations are of intellectual sort and a human team, usually integrated by librarians or by specialists in the topic, carries them out by hand (Koch, 2000). The main objective of subject gateways is to provide fast and effective access to their users to high quality information through Internet.

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