Research4Life’s HINARI Wins MLA’s 2015 Louise M. Darling Medal for Outstanding Health Science Collection

Published: Monday 18th May 2015
Category: News

HINARI Program Manager, Kimberly Parker receives the T. Mark Hodges International Service Award

 

Kimberly Parker (middle) receiving the award.

Kimberly Parker, HINARI program manager (middle) displaying the MLA’s 2015 Louise Darling Medal.

Austin, Texas May 18th 2015The Medical Library Association and Research4Life partnership announced today that the HINARI program has received the MLA’s 2015 Louise Darling Medal for Collection Development in the Health Sciences. Launched in 2002, the HINARI Access to Research in Health program is managed by the World Health Organization in partnership with Yale University Library and over 160 publishers. More than 5,600 public institutions in over 100 eligible countries have access to HINARI which provides access to 14, 000 journals and 33,000 e-books. HINARI is the first of four Research4Life programs which also include AGORA, OARE and ARDI which provide developing countries with free or low cost access to discipline specific peer-reviewed content online.

It is with great pleasure that the Board of Directors of the Medical Library Association joins us in offering our heartfelt congratulations on HINARI’s selection as the recipient of the 2015 Louise Darling Medal for Distinguished Achievement in Collection Development in the Health Sciences, one of MLA’s highest honors. We would like to applaud both HINARI as a program and its driver, Kimberly Parker for outstanding contributions to the field of health sciences librarianship,” said Linda Walton, AHIP President, Medical Library Association.

As one of the six founding HINARI publisher partners, Elsevier is proud to offer a quarter of the content in this critical program,” said Ylann Schemm, Head of Corporate Responsibility, Elsevier and chair of the Research4Life communications team. “Over the past decade, we have seen both HINARI and Research4Life grow exponentially—not only with the number of registered institutions and the content-but also the growth of research output and the use of evidence based medicine in many developing countries.

Kimberly Parker, HINARI Program Manager noted, “This honor is due to the hard work and contributions not just of the HINARI team and the colleagues at Yale who do so much behind the scenes, but also all the publisher partners who have contributed their content and their expertise to help grow the partnership.” Parker will be distinguished with the T. Mark Hodges Award for outstanding individual achievement in promoting, enabling, and delivering improvements in the quality of health information internationally through health information professionals, the improvement of libraries, or an increased use of health information services.

It is largely due to Ms Parker’s leadership that four UN agencies, two US libraries, nearly 200 publishers worldwide, and a group of technical players have successfully worked together in the informal partnership that makes up Research4Life to transform the working lives of tens of thousands of researchers, physicians, and policy makers in the developing world by bringing them access to critical scientific and medical research,” said Richard Gedye, Director of Outreach Programmes, The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers.

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Notes to Editors:

HINARI and Kimberly Parker, HINARI Program Manager will both be celebrated at the Medical Library Association’s Awards Luncheon at the 2015 Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas scheduled for Monday, May 18 from 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.

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About the Medical Library Association

Founded in 1898, the Medical Library Association (MLA) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, educational organization of 3,000 individual and institutional members in the health sciences information field that provides lifelong educational opportunities, supports a knowledgebase of health information research, and works with a global network of partners to promote the importance of quality information for improved health to the health care community and the public.

About Research4Life

Research4Life (www.research4life.org) is a public-private partnership between over 200 international scientific publishers, the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), Cornell and Yale Universities in collaboration with the WHO, FAO, UNEP, WIPO, and technology partner, Microsoft. Research4Life aims to help attain six of the UNs eight Millennium Development Goals by 2015, reducing the scientific knowledge gap between industrialized countries and the developing world.

Since 2001, the four programmes, Access to Research in Health (HINARI), Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture (AGORA), Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE) and Access to Research for Development and Innovation (ARDI), have grown and developed to the point where they now give researchers at more than 6,000 institutions in over 100 developing world countries and territories free or low cost online access to over 35,000 peer-reviewed international scientific journals, books, and databases provided by the world’s leading science publishers.

Media Contact:

Natalia Rodriguez
Research4Life Communications Coordinator
[email protected]
Twitter: @R4LPartnership

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