ENHANCED ACCESS FOR LATIN AMERICAN SOCIAL MEDICINE

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Social medicine in Latin America has become a widely respected and influential field of research, teaching, and clinical practice, yet its accomplishments remain little known in the English-speaking and -reading world. Important publications remain untranslated from Spanish and Portuguese into English. The? field s development also suffers from technical difficulties of publication and distribution within Latin America. This project?s overall objective is to develop and implement an Internet-based information system to maximize access to Latin American social medicine literature and to facilitate continuing publication and distribution efforts in this important field. We will construct the system to target English-reading health professionals, specialists in Latin American studies, and professionals in library and information science. As articles and books are obtained from the Latin American publishers, a structured abstract will be created for each source. After extensive quality checks, the translated abstracts will be entered into a database at the Health Science Center Library of the University of New Mexico (UNM). Library systems personnel will mount the abstracts on the UNM Web page, and links to and from institutions outside UNM will be created. This project will devote attention in particular to the following themes in Latin American social medicine, which are emphases of the National Institutes of Health. Information in these thematic areas will prove useful for key investigators of health issues in the United States: social, environmental, and nutritional causes of infant and perinatal mortality, (NICHHD); economic development, demographic change, and aging( NIA); socioeconomic barriers to cancer prevention (NCI): determinants of mental illness in race or ethnic background, social class, gender, and social violence (IMH); and policy research on managed care, primary care innovations, and preventive services (AHCPR). The information svstem will reach a broad group of users by identifying core and seminal works in Latin American social medicine, by creating and translating structured abstracts in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, and by making them available through the application of Internet technologies. In addition, the Internet mechanism will implement an ongoing, on-line access system for publishing and distributing structured abstracts and articles of key journals in Latin American social medicine.