Empowering Medical Librarians:
NLM Associates Program and the Network of African Medical Librarians
In 2001, NLM invited the first African medical librarian to be part of NLM’s year-long, primarily domestic, Associate Fellows Program. Since then, six librarians from the African continent have participated. These librarians and others from a total of seven academic institutions in Kenya, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe have now formed the Network of African Medical Librarians, an independent consortium with a secretariat at Kenyatta University in Kenya.
The Network’s vision is to strengthen health sciences education, research and outreach for better health outcomes in Africa. Their mission is to expand the frontiers of knowledge through the training of, and outreach to African librarians, the academic community, health care professionals, health policy makers in finding, organizing and using of health information.
The Network has been active in improving electronic access to research and health care information for researchers, students, health care workers and policy makers in Africa. To this end, the Network, with support from NLM, has developed a training manual titled Finding, Organising and Using Health Information, which is available in print and electronic formats. View the modules on the ADHL website here, under Online Courses.
2012 MEPI Symposium in Addis Ababa
Network of African Medical Librarians (NAML)
African Digital Health Library Project
We are ending the grant period of the African Digital
Health Library on a high note!
We have submitted a letter of support endorsing London Global Cancer Week at the request of Mark Lodge of International Network for Cancer Treatment and Research (INCTR.) In particular, the day-long session "Cancer control in low and middle income countries: New solutions to evolving challenges" speaks to the critical need to push forward the agenda for control of this heinous non-communicable disease in countries where the focus and funding have primarily been on infectious disease. As you can see from a simple search on the website Nason Bimbe has created, cancer research has gone on and is ongoing in all ADHL countries. We applaud London Global Cancer Week and the inclusivity it makes possible as it seeks to widen the circle to encompass cancer in countries north and south.
Your concerted effort to digitize and make available indigenous research as part of ADHL at six universities in five African countries reveals previous research in areas such as cancer which is only recently coming to the fore as a serious health problem on the African continent. Your work in showcasing theses, dissertations, and Ministry of Health reports which were lying dormant on library shelves is a critical chapter to the cancer story and many others. In their new life online, these documents can be available to anyone with an Internet connection.
“While the libraries operate individually in their countries, the website at https://adhl.africa/ brings them together, so that a user can search the ADHL holdings in six universities at once. Going forward, this aggregation will provide opportunities for creating value added services such as contextualizing the content being curated at each of the sites. Reviewing early usage statistics, we see the predominant searches/downloads are coming from in-country - a good indicator of the usefulness of this database,” Nason Bimbe, technical expert.
The platform on which the ADHL resides is supported for the next 2 years. The ADHL online is a living - not a static and dormant - site. You can rest assured ADHL will live and be robust into the near future, giving you the opportunity to grow the content and user community and develop a plan for the long term sustainability of the ADHL.
There will be many stories to tell as you build your collections of full texts online. We hope you will SPREAD THE WORD, share this resource far and wide, starting with your local site and expanding through your colleagues at AHILA and beyond. And do keep us posted as well!
We have confidence that you will rise to the challenge of building your repository and making sure that colleagues at your university and Ministry of Health know about ADHL. It is a treasure! Congratulations!
Sending you all the best,
Julia, Becky, Nason
Julia is Principal Investigator for $500K project funded by Office of Global AIDS Coordinator – digital health repositories by medical librarians in 7 African countries.
The principal objective of ADHL is to provide resources for educators, scholars, medical practitioners and general audiences all around the World.
Closing Remarks
Resources
African Digital Health Library: Digital Health Repositories for Research in Africa, a project-based approach to mentoring - October 2019 Report
This report presents the ADHL Aggregation platform that makes the connection of the various ADHL nodes into a cohesive whole, thus making the visibility and accessibility of the health research knowledge curated at the nodes in one place. With this arrangement it is hoped that it will make it easier for users to discover, access and possibly consume the research knowledge in a much-streamlined way
Freebie; Print your own ADHL Branded mug.
Click above to download artwork (2.9MB)
Original Artwork for the project poster by African artist Ronnie Ogwang.