Missouri Go Local Project
Abstract
In 2004, Missouri became the second state to offer Go Local links from MedlinePlus. The Missouri Model uses an existing database, Community Connection http://www.communityconnection.org, which contains information on community resources in Missouri and surrounding counties. Community Connection is maintained by information professionals at the University of Missouri Extension Office. The Community Connection database contains information about 15,000 organizations. Approximately 5,000 of these are for health related organizations. While the Community Connection database is an excellent source for links to organizations, agencies and government units, to date no systematic attempt has been made to identify health related support groups. Since support groups are one of the most important reasons why a health consumer might want to “Go local”, funding is sought to develop this aspect of the database in two ways: 1) by hiring a half-time graduate library student devoted to identifying and recommending resources to add to the community connection database; 2) by enlisting the help of “mavens”; contact people around the state who can recommend nearby organizations and support groups from their part of the state. Community Connection is “a central source but with decentralized control”, meaning that each organization is responsible for entering and editing their own records in the database. With so many individuals entering data, indexing consistency can be compromised. Funding is sought for a half-time graduate library student to review existing database records to ensure that all organizations of a given type, e.g. nursing homes, are similarly indexed to ensure consistent retrieval.
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