1. New Drivers for the Range of Public Health Information: Healthy People 2020 Information Access Project and the Public Health Literature Mapping Study
Nancy Schaefer, MLIS, AHIP, University of Florida Health Science Center Libraries
Melissa L. Rethlefsen, MLS, AHIP, Education Technology Librarian,
Mayo Clinic Libraries
Kay H. Smith, MLS, AHIP, Associate Professor/Community Services Librarian,
UAB Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences

2. What is Healthy People?
A set of national objectives for improving the health of all Americans. Basically, a strategic plan to:
ID nationwide health improvement priorities
Increase public awareness and understanding of the determinants of health, disease and disability
Engage multiple sectors in actions to strengthen policies and improve practice, driven by the best available evidence and knowledge
ID critical needs for research, evaluation and data collection

3. How does it work? At 10-year intervals:
Public health experts from multiple agencies
prepare draft objectives
The Federal Interagency Workgroup
reviews public comments on the objectives
selects and refines final objectives
Throughout the decade, data are collected to enable monitoring of progress on the objectives
Healthy People 2020 builds on these 4 previous Healthy People initiatives:
1979 Surgeon General’s Report, Healthy People: The Surgeon General’s Report on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention
Healthy People 1990: Promoting Health/Preventing Disease: Objectives for the Nation
Healthy People 2000: National Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Objectives
Healthy People 2010: Objectives for Improving Health

4. Healthy People 2020 Subject Areas
New indicates subject areas added for the 2020 objectives that were not in the last set of Healthy People objectives (2010.)

5. Healthy People 2020 - Sample Objectives
for the Cancer subject area:

6. Information Access Project
Purpose: Facilitate public health practitioners’ use of evidence to select interventions/health promotion strategies to meet the Healthy People 2010 objectives.
Process:
DHHS experts selected 3-9 objectives in each of the 28 subject areas of Healthy People 2010
The National Library of Medicine recruited librarians who served public health users
The librarians developed search strategies in the predominantly clinical PubMed database for each selected objective
DHHS expert reviewed results for gaps and irrelevant retrievals
The librarians revised the search strategies. DHHS standards occasionally required several review-and-refine cycles
NLM mounted finalized strategies in the Topic Specific section of PubMed
Process Point 1: Use of these pre-formulated strategies was so high that even before release of the final 2020 objectives, public health practitioners were “clamoring” for strategies for ALL objectives in the new set. Consequently, DHHS did not select objectives for pre-formulated searches: Every one of the 2020 objectives will have a pre-formulated search. No longer a pilot of limited searches, it was renamed from Information Access Project to Structured Evidence Queries.

7. Navigating to final pre-formulated HP searches in PubMed

8. Single click delivers ACTIVE search results
Strategy appears in:
Search Box
Search Details box in right sidebar and
Search History for:
review
modification
combination with other search results
setting up of alerts of new items meeting search criteria

9. Numbers prove “if you build it, they will come”
From: Marjorie A. Cahn, Ione Auston, Catherine R. Selden, Keith Cogdill, Stacy Baker, Debra Cavanaugh, Sterling Elliott, Allison J. Foster, Carolyn J. Leep, Debra Joy Perez, and Blakely R. Pomietto, The Partners in Information Access for the Public Health Workforce: a collaboration to improve and protect the public's health, 1995–2006.
J Med Libr Assoc July; 95(3): 301–309. doi:  /

10. PH Lit Mapping Project - History
Summer 2010 – Kay Smith queried Public Health/Health Administration section of MLA’s discussion list about core journal titles in a particular topic area
Subsequent exchange between Ms. Smith and Ms. Rethlefsen: “somebody should do something” about mapping the public health literature
Fall 2010 – Smith & Rethlefsen initiated the mapping project

11. PH Lit Mapping Project Process Sources
American Journal of Public Health - Process published in ( MC /)
MODIFIED from NAHRS protocol ocol_2010.pdf to investigate hypothesis that several types of non-journal literature are being cited in significant numbers in some sub-disciplines of public health

12. Citation Analysis Process
Identify source journal(s)
Count number of total references and number
of referenced journal articles over 3-year period
Pull two sample sets,
one from total and one from articles only
Sample 1:
Record type and age of citation
Sample 2:
Record age and cited journal
Analyze data

13. Subject Areas Being Researched
Environmental Health
PH Informatics
Epidemiology
PH Practice
Global Health
HIV/AIDS
Health Policy/
Infectious/Emerging Disease
Economics
Disasters/Preparedness
Maternal-Child Health
Health Disparities
PH Nutrition
Occupational Health

14. Ultimate Goal
Publication, dissemination for use in decision-making in collection management and staff training:
Key journal titles and broader disciplines for each specialty
Monograph/serials budgeting
Collection management and weeding decisions based on materials age
Grey literature needs
Key titles: The study’s purpose is to show the scope and range of the necessary materials for research and practice in each field. For example, in environmental health, pulmonology and respiratory journals are hugely important, as are water science, agriculture, and engineering titles.
Preliminary data collected by August 18 indicated that 85% of the citations in environmental health were to journal articles. For infectious disease, this percentage was 91%.
Budgeting: If your school or agency is really strong in a sub-discipline (i.e. environmental health), you might want to have a higher budget for monographs than if your school/agency only works in infectious diseases, where we believe our research will prove there’s a much heavier dependence on journals.
Age: Some PH fields definitely use older materials than others, and the push--especially in public health departments--is to get rid of older materials. We want to see what fields use older materials and how old that material is. We don’t have enough results back to make valid conclusions, but 3 fields (environmental health, occupational health and infectious disease) the year old range was cited a lot more than two of the coauthors thought it would be.
Grey literature: Some students don’t even think to look for grey lit when searching for materials to support their research. Cataloging some key grey lit might just help folks to remember, especially because in our experience, Grey lit is very important to some of the sub-disciplines of public health. Should we be collecting and cataloging it? If your school/agency does significant research/teaching with grey lit, should reference staff get training to look for it and tech services staff to catalog it?

15. Lessons Learned Healthy People 2020 Searches
Librarians in all types of libraries—federal, state, non-profit--are thinly-stretched in terms of their time/energy and library budgets
Despite improvements over the past 8 years, PubMed still lacks the breadth of controlled vocabulary needed for precise evidence-based public health searching
Public Health Literature Mapping:
No one has print anymore!
Citation analysis is time consuming, but a sampling process takes less time than global citation analysis

16. Hope these tools prove useful for your users and resource collection!
Nancy Schaefer
Melissa Rethlefsen
Kay Hogan-Smith