Improving Public Health Grey Literature Access for the Public Health Workforce
Description
The broad, long-term objective of this project is to provide the public health workforce with improved access to high quality, highly relevant public health grey literature reports, based on the premise that such access has the potential to positively impact the quality, effectiveness, and efficiency of planning, conducting, and evaluating public health interventions.
Our goals are to extend, test, and evaluate a public health grey literature information system. The research consists of two components – 1) continuation of a user-focused technical system development, and 2) evaluations of this system on the tasks of the public health workforce in county health agencies.
The technical system is a web-based system that gathers and mounts a collection of high quality grey literature reports, that is easily updated and tailored for specific needs, and is searchable through natural language, free text queries or a fill-in-the-blanks form. Results will display quick summaries – rich representations of the essential information elements contained in these reports using Natural Language Processing (NLP) based on the validated model of public health intervention reports from our earlier Robert Wood Johnson funded basic research project. Sufficient informativeness of the document summaries produced by the system will enable accurate selection by the public health workforce of full reports for further review.
Project Period
March 2006 - March 2009
Sponsor: National Library of Medicine / National Institutes of Health
