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February 2, 2006

Minority health archives launched

Pitt’s Center for Minority Health, part of the Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH), and the University Library System (ULS) jointly have launched the Minority Health Archive (MHA) as an on-line repository for minority health documents.

MHA takes advantage of the latest information technology used by Pitt’s library system.

In addition to being the first electronic archives devoted solely to minority health and health disparity research, MHA has special features that allow individuals outside of the University to post resources to the archives for approval by the editors.

To date, 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 MHA.

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. Scholars can use this software to disseminate research results rapidly and to foster subject-specific collaborative global research communities.

A wide variety of materials may be deposited in the archives, including scholarly research papers (either fully peer-reviewed articles or pre-print manuscripts), government documents, theses and dissertations, newsletters and photographic images.

The archives also is designed to store an abundance of material categorized as “grey” literature — working papers, white papers, policy papers and technical reports — highly valuable information that often is not widely distributed in paper format.

Access to the archive is free and open to the general public worldwide.

The archives can be accessed at http://minority-health.pitt.edu/.


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