History
SPIRAL began as a collaborative endeavor between the South Cove Community Health Center, New England’s premier primary and preventative health center for Asian Americans, and the Tufts University Hirsh Health Sciences Library. Long-time neighbors in the Chinatown section of Boston, the Tufts University Hirsh Health Sciences Library and South Cove Community Health Center entered into a collaborative partnership in 2001 to address a growing need for Asian language health information in the Boston-area. In Massachusetts alone there has been a 68% increase in the Asian population. According to United States Census data, the Asian American population in the U.S. as a whole grew 72% between 1990 and 2000.
Librarians at the Tufts University Hirsh Health Sciences Library are responsible for locating authoritative information on these languages. Methods employed to locate authoritative information include utilizing popular web search engines, soliciting recommendations from health provider and consumer health professionals working with Asian-language speaking populations and consulting consumer health resources focusing on multicultural health and cultural competency (e.g., journals, listservs). Resources are considered for inclusion on the SPIRAL web site if they have English-language versions of documents available for comparison and were created by authoritative sources. Information sources are classified as authoritative if they are:
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- Government agencies, both U.S. and international (U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; National Health Service, UK)
- Universities (Georgia State University; NYU Center for Child Study)
- Hospitals (Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, WA)
- Premier non-profit health agencies (American Cancer Society; Royal College of Psychiatrists, UK)
- Multi-lingual health specialists who have recommended or submitted information for inclusion
Selected resources are organized on the SPIRAL web site by health topic and by language. Qualified, volunteer translators have reproduced the SPIRAL web site and related materials into the target languages to allow native speakers to navigate the site more easily.
Read more about this topic: SPIRAL: Selected Patient Information In Asian Languages
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