It is with great enthusiasm and deep appreciation to many that HSLIC formally announces receipt of funds to support the future and sustainability of the library's Native Health Database (NHD). Funded by the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) South Central Region (SCR), $24,348 has been secured to migrate 10,046 records presently found in the Native Health Database into a new database platform. Once completed, HSLIC seeks to leverage community engagement opportunities to find new content and responsibly build on the strengths of the current NHD.
HSLIC lost a valuable colleague when Patricia Bradley (Diné), the library's Native and Distance Services Librarian, passed away in Spring 2019. Patricia's passing left a void in her work with outreach and teaching, as well as with her leadership of the NHD. Jonathan Pringle, HSLIC's Scholarly Communication and Digital Librarian, was hired in September 2019; as part of his responsibilities, he was tasked with management of the NHD and determining some next steps. Notably, no new content has been added to NHD since Spring 2019.
Patricia Bradley (front row, 2nd from right) with the NHD Advisory Board, November 2016
After a significant period of quiet reflection, consideration, and collaborative conversation with former advisors of the NHD--many of whom are Indigenous and work in myriad segments of the health field--in October 2020 Jonathan presented a vision for where the NHD could head. A link to a 20-minute recording of this presentation is available here. An updated NHD would emphasize responsible sharing; introduce community control over content; and most notably provide direct access to the content itself. HSLIC settled on Mukurtu CMS, a platform that "aims to empower communities to manage, share, and exchange their digital heritage in culturally relevant and ethically-minded ways." A new model for submission of content will now come from a community of contributors, and Indigenous communities will have more control over this content.
The first step was to figure out how best to migrate 10,000+ records from the current NHD into the new NHD. To help facilitate this process, a funding opportunity with NNLM/SCR presented itself, and by December 2020 a formal proposal was submitted. Jonathan would serve as PI. In the new year, word was received that HSLIC was successful in obtaining the funds. In January 2021, HSLIC hired Maxine Marks, a PhD student at UNM, to undertake the task of cleaning up existing metadata and prepare it for import into the new NHD.
In March 2021, Jonathan provided an update with the metadata migration process, and again reinforced the potential of the new NHD post-migration. This 33-minute video/presentation is available here.
With a few weeks left in this grant-funded project (ending April 30), there remain a few thousand records left to be properly migrated. HSLIC is laser-focused on getting this final grouping completed, then taking a short rest before leveraging the best of what Mukurtu CMS can offer to deliver a new NHD for students, staff/faculty, researchers, and the public. The current NHD will be replaced with the new NHD at some point in May. Stay tuned!
Our thanks to NNLM/SCR, former NHD advisors, Maxine Marks, and the whole team at HSLIC for making this collaborative project possible.
This project is funded under cooperative agreement number UG4LM012345 with the University of North Texas Health Science Center - Gibson D. Lewis Library, and awarded by the DHHS, NIH, National Library of Medicine.
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