The Indiana University School of Medicine and The Polis Center at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis have been named by the National Library of Medicine to develop the nation’s only National Outreach Mapping Center.
The new center, which is housed on the IUPUI campus at the medical school’s Ruth Lilly Medical Library, will seek to identify and track the special outreach efforts being made by all types of libraries nationwide on behalf of healthcare professionals and consumers.
Examples of these outreach efforts include, teaching consumers to “quality filter” the web, supplying information access tools to rural health care providers or working with local community groups to establish health information centers.
The center is being established through a five-year contract with the National Library of Medicine, a part of the National Institutes of Health. The IU School of Medicine is an international leader in medical informatics and health care outcomes research.
The Polis Center, a multidisciplinary urban analysis organization, is known for its application of geographic information systems technology. Known as GIS, this technology, a tool useful in data collection, storage, mapping, display and analyses, links electronic maps to databases. GIS makes data accessible and facilitates the analysis and comparison of multiple data sets by specific geography.
“We plan to integrate data from various libraries and map it in ways that make it easily understandable because it relates to the places where people live,” said David Bodenhamer, Ph.D., director of The Polis Center and professor of history in the School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI. The project will merge IU’s medical and geographic informatics strengths to develop a unique center.
“The original mission of the National Library of Medicine was to provide rapid access to health care information to providers of medical care to enable them to improve the quality of that care. Now that focus is being expanded to health care consumers,” says Julie McGowan, Ph.D., the newly named director of the mapping center.
Dr. McGowan, who is associate dean for information resources and education technology, also is director of library and information resources, professor of knowledge informatics, and professor of pediatrics at the IU School of Medicine. She also is a Regenstrief Institute for Health Care affiliated scientist.
Initially, the large database that will be developed by the new mapping center will identify and track a quarter century of NLM outreach efforts. Eventually it will assist researchers to accurately target health outreach activities because they will be able to pinpoint exactly where the information is needed, according to McGowan.
In addition to providing information services for the students and faculty of the IU Schools of Medicine and Nursing, the Ruth Lilly Medical Library serves practicing health professionals throughout Indiana and is a designated resource library in the National Network of Libraries of Medicine. The Polis Center is the leader of the North American team of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, an international effort to create a worldwide database that combines global mapping, texts and images.