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 nations only National Outreach Mapping Center.

The new center, which is housed on the IUPUI campus at the medical schools 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 IUs 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 impr
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Contact: Cindy Fox Aisen
caisen@iupui.edu
317-274-7722
Indiana University
12-Apr-2002