Development is underway on NOAH, the CUNY-led online community health information project.
As reported in the Fall '94 issue of FYeI, CUNY was awarded a $275,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce's NTIA (National Telecommunications and Information Administration) to develop a Consumer Health Information Network for the New York region.
Working in collaboration with the New York Public Library (NYPL), the New York Academy of Medicine (NYAM), and the New York Metropolitan Reference & Research Library Agency (METRO), CUNY is currently developing NOAH (New York Online Access to Health), a World-Wide Web guide in English and Spanish to area health information and resources.
According to Marsha Ra, CUNY's University Director of Library Services and Principal Investigator for the NTIA grant, a lot of good health information is already available on the Internet. "What makes our service unique" she says, "is that we are striving to be totally bilingual." The intention is to incorporate a high-level machine translator that can translate all online health information, perhaps even rapid translation of information retrieved "on the fly" from outside Internet sites.
"Another difference," says Kirsten Dehner, Creative Director and Producer for the project, "is that we will apply a level of logical organization that most other services lack." Toward that goal, NOAH is being developed using Oracle, a relational database tool that will allow NOAH to retrieve and manipulate data on the Internet, and that will eventually allow users to search for health information by multiple topic or category or by keyword. An innovative Body Map search tool is also being developed.
Current plans call for the placement of 28 dedicated workstations at sites to be distributed among key public-access locations in and around New York City, perhaps in selected CUNY libraries, medical libraries, the NYPL library, and at NYAM. These preliminary sites will be established in all five boroughs and in Westchester County. Eight of the 28 workstations will have "visual assist" monitors to allow magnification of text to aid the sight-impaired.
NOAH will provide standard links to Internet health information, but access to certain licensed data from selected commercial vendors will be available only from the dedicated workstations. Three supplemental libraries of information have already been identified which will be available only from NOAH: the United Way Source Book, the SilverPlatter Health and Drug Information Library, and either the Physician's Desk Reference or the Physicians GenRx.
In addition, many other health organizations, such as GMHC, the New York City Department of Health, and the March of Dimes, have agreed to supply data that will reside on CUNY's NOAH server. NOAH will also provide direct links to the NYAM catalogue and to NYPL's Directory of Community Services, each of which resides on its own dedicated server at those respective sites.
Outside interest in the NOAH project remains high. For example, NOAH has recently been selected by the National Cancer Institute to be a site for the Spanish version of CancerNet's PDQ Statements (information that is not otherwise available on the Internet). Locally, a consortium of settlement houses is in the process of establishing workstations in their community rooms which they hope will point directly to NOAH.
While NOAH development continues, a test site with four Dell multimedia workstations will soon be set up at 555 West 57th Street. The NOAH Steering Committee will pull in focus groups to test NOAH before the 28 workstations are made available to the public.
If you'd like to check out NOAH "under construction," the address is:
Present Address (under NOAH'S current working title, "LONNY"): http://sunflight.osc.cuny.edu:8080/web/html/welcome.html
Future Address: http://www.noah.cuny.edu
-- by Larry McCue