HIPNET - Health Information and Publications Network

New & forthcoming materials
Organization Information Sheets
USAID Development Experience Clearinghouse
SOW for Field Evaluation of Publications Impact
PHMWG Database of New Resources
Next Internet Conference
RH Gateway
Advance Africa Presentation
PATH Presentation on Evaluation
Group Name Change
Next Meeting Date
Attendance

I. New & forthcoming materials and publications

II. Organization Information Sheets
Submit your organization's information sheet (1-pager describing your mission, audiences, types of publications, contact information) to Peggy D'Adamo, mdadamo@jhuccp.org. Information sheets will be linked from the Members page. We currently have the following information sheets in electronic form:

• Advocates for Youth
• DELIVER Project (JSI)
• Environmental Health Project
• HORIZONS Project
• Ipas
• JHPIEGO
• LINKAGES
• PATH
• POLICY Project

III. USAID Development Experience Clearinghouse - Justin McFadden

• McFadded explained that DEC needs some renovation. The turnaround time for posting docs varies. They are low on manpower.
• He encourages submissions in electronic format—your documents will be posted more quickly. PDFs are best.
• The site provides searching for documents by region and topic.
• The DEC Express email notice goes out every two weeks and announces new additions.
• If you want DEC to highlight your docs in DEC Express, please contact Justin.
• Feedback/questions: Justin McFadden: jmcfadden@dec.cdie.org
• You can email docs from DEC to your contacts.
• Mostly people outside the agency access the site, but Justin did not have any stats about users or audiences. There is a monthly listing on the DEC homepage of the most popular documents (scroll down to see it at www.dec.org).
• They do not want flyers, newsletters, and other PR types of materials. They will take documents on CD and they will distribute those to people who request them.
• There is still some confusion about exactly what they will take. Maria Busquets suggested that DEC make their submission guidelines a bit more clear.
• Anything older than 5 years gets archived in a different database.
• DEC does not feed its content into the USAID website. Contact your CTO about getting information about your activities/publications onto the USAID site. Peggy D'Adamo will follow up with Maria Busquets to get contacts for submitting links/information to the various parts of the USAID GH web site.
• It was suggested that DEC provide a FAQ page about submission problems people have encountered. There is already an FAQ with some information at http://www.dec.org/doctypes.cfm

• The draft of the SOW was completed and given to Maria Busquets at USAID. It is very much a working draft.
• Maria thinks it is an excellent draft and took it to Population and Reproductive Health people at USAID. She now thinks the SOW should be considered throughout the Global Health Bureau. She has spoken to other offices at the Bureau and all are interested for different reasons.
• There are still many questions to ask about the SOW and how it fits into overall Bureau priorities. Maria doesn’t know where it will go. She suggests that we consider using the draft SOW to guide our own mini-evaluations, which AID could then collect and look at.
• Download a copy of the Draft SOW.
• Questions? Talk to Lori Ashford, mailto:lashford@prb.org

• Search the database here.
• Peggy D'Adamo and Laura Raney created the database and entered in an initial group of 350 publications from about 10-15 organizations. Most publications are already existing publications. We need to add more forthcoming and draft publications.
• By the next meeting, PHMWG members will be able to enter information themselves through a web interface.
• The dbase currently includes the following information about each publication: publisning status, topic/keyword, country, languages, description, URL, organization name, contact e-mail address.
• Fields to add: Date/year of publication, audience code, type of material, date entered. Have we missed anything?
• Continue to send your lists to Peggy electronically. Peggy and Laura will work further on the keywords, types of publications and audience codes.
• The groups would also like to link to descriptive 1-pagers about each organization. See Item I for some examples. These will also be linked from member list, so please include information about your organization.
• Not all the topics are strictly related to reproductive health but the group itself is bigger than RH, so that's OK.
• Peggy wants feedback so please look at the database and send her ideas.
• We can also enter CD and web publications - don't have to be strictly paper publications.
• The dbase could be used later as the basis for the future joint ordering system on RHGateway.
• Questions: Contact Peggy D'Adamo, mailto:mdadamo@jhuccp.org or Laura Raney, mailto:lraney@pcdc.org.

• Steve Goldstein is heading this up. Email him if you want to serve on the committee or have an idea for speakers or topics.
• Dates: April 2003 at the earliest.
• Place: Probably JHU School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) on Connecticut Avenue in DC - same as last conference.
• Duration: Probably two days
• Possible presentations:
  - future of ICT for international public health development
  - putting information on CD-ROM, creating databases
  - communities of practice and ICTs
  - virtual hubs, resource sharing and ICTs
  - blended learning: using virtual/face to face/paper resources for learning
  - information pathways & how to best share information
  - knowledge management/knowledge sharing/knowledge utilization
  - measurement: using technology to measure the impact of resources
  - mobile communication (radio, wireless) and public health
  - bringing ICTs to rural populations
  - future trends (with vendors)
  - developing country experiences - knowledge management/knowledge sharing trends beyond public health
  - using ICT to measure communications impact.
• Booths: We agreed to keep to the information tables format and not have a full-blown exhibition with individual booths.
• We don’t want to restrict it to just focusing on reproductive health because we can learn from information flows from any field.
• Committee will meet in the next 6 weeks to start planning the conference.
• Questions/comments: Contact Steve Goldstein, mailto:SGOLDSTE@jhuccp.org

VII. RH Gateway

• 2 member organizations did large mailings of the promotional postcards - Population Council (1000 postcards) and PRB (9,000 postcards).
• If your organization, can mail out some postcards, Contact Peggy D'Adamo, mailto:mdadamo@jhuccp.org .
• Consider putting a link to the RHG on your hompage, on your 'links' page, on your site search page, or somewhere on your site. If you do, please let Peggy D'Adamo know about it
• Hits on the site are growing as is the number of people on the listserv. 50% work in developing countries.
• RHG now has direct links to searches on other websites and dbases such as Development Gateway (which links back to RHGateway), PubMed, Popline, Development Experience Clearinghouse.
• An online form which will allow users to add materials and information to the online calendar and announcements is ready to launch.
• Maria Busquets has shown RHG to the heads of a number of CAs and they were impressed.
• USAID head is very into knowledge management and there will soon be a mini-launch of USAID’s strategies for knowledge management. RHGateway is a good example of knowledge management
• Maria also noted that she was getting way too many hits on RHG when she conducted a search. Peggy mentioned that you can always search the results of a search and that RHGateway will try to emphasize this to users of the service. She also proposed adding the ability for people to download a RHG toolbar for searching.
• Please send new publication announcements to Peggy and she will try to feature them on the RHG homepage.
• Questions: Contact Peggy D'Adamo, mailto:mdadamo@jhuccp.org

Disclaimer: The information provided on this web site is not official U.S. Government information and does not represent the views or positions of the U.S. Agency for International Development or the U.S. Government.