CMH, ULS Create Minority Health Archive
Pitt’s Center for Minority Health (CMH) in the Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH) and the University Library System (ULS) have joined to develop the Minority Health Archive (MHA), an online repository for minority health documents.
The MHA was publicly launched January 8 at the National Leadership Summit on Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health in Washington, D.C.
“Unfortunately, much of the history of minority health is recorded in federal documents, foundation reports, legislation, and organizational proceedings, which are not readily available to the general public and may be missed by academic programs training the next generation of health professionals,” said Stephen Thomas, CMH director and the Philip Hallen Professor of Community Health and Social Justice in GSPH, who will serve as executive editor of the archive. “The Minority Health Archive is our contribution to address this problem.”
The MHA takes advantage of the latest information technology being used by ULS. In addition to being the first electronic archive devoted solely to minority health and health disparity research, it has special features that allow individuals outside of the University to post resources to the archive for approval by the editors.
“It is the open access that represents a critical breakthrough in advancing the flow of communication and knowledge needed to advance minority health in the 21st century,” Thomas said.
“We at the ULS are pleased to be able to provide the technical support for the Minority Health Archive,” said Rush G. Miller, Hillman University Librarian and director of ULS. “This is our fifth discipline-wide open-access archive in partnership with distinguished faculty and academic programs at the University of Pittsburgh.”
To date, the MHA maintains all of the National Institutes of Health strategic plans for the elimination of racial and ethnic health disparities by 2010. It also holds limited released photos from the controversial Tuskegee Syphilis Study (1932–1972).
Many other resources relating to the health of the seven U.S.-recognized minority racial and ethnic groups (Black/African American, Asian, Pacific Islander, Alaska Native, Native American/American Indian, Native Hawaiian, and Latino) are contained in the MHA.
The MHA is made possible by EPrints software, a tool for building collections of digital documents. Through its “author self-archiving” feature, the software provides an easy way for registered users to deposit a digital document in a publicly accessible Web site at no cost and in less than 10 minutes through a simple Web interface. Scholars can use this software to disseminate research results rapidly and to foster subject-specific collaborative global research communities. For more information on EPrints, see www.eprints.org.
A wide variety of materials may be deposited in the archive, including scholarly research papers (either fully peer-reviewed articles or preprint manuscripts), government documents, theses and dissertations, newsletters, and photographic images. The archive also is designed to store an abundance of material categorized as “gray” literature—working papers, white papers, policy papers, and technical reports—that is often not widely distributed in paper format.
Access to the archive is free and open to the general public worldwide. Registered users may subscribe to free e-mail updates, notifying them when new materials appear in the archive in their specific areas of interest. The archive may be accessed at minority-health.pitt.edu.
—Allan Aldinger