Meet the Special Library: Center on Media and Child Health
By Brandy King, Brandy.King@childrens.harvard.edu

My name is Brandy King and I am the Librarian at the Center on Media and Child Health (CMCH) based at Children’s Hospital Boston.  Started in January 2003 by Dr. Michael Rich, CMCH is a joint project of Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and Harvard School of Public Health.  Its mission is to advance scientific research, clinical interventions, and education on the subject of media and their effects, positive and negative, on the physical and mental health of children and adolescents.

In addition to a staff of 6-10 senior scientists carrying out original research on the effects of media, the other main project of CMCH (and my job as the sole information professional) is to create what will be the first comprehensive searchable online database of citations on media and the health risks they pose to children.  Since this kind of research has historically been carried out in many fields (Psychology, Medicine, Gender Studies, Anthropology, Communications, and Public Health to name a few!), the literature is both disparate and diffuse across academic fields.  The ability to see the extant research in one place on equivalent terms will allow research scientists, clinicians, educators, parents, media producers, and the public to "see the whole picture."   It will be easy to assess the current state of the research: what has been done, what has been done but should be re-assessed, and where more research is needed.

We use the bibliographic software EndNote 7.0 to build and maintain our master database, which currently holds 7,365 citations on issues such as whether violent video games affect children’s aggression and how body image in the media affects young women’s self concept.  Citations are gathered through researcher recommendations, reference lists of relevant papers, table of contents alerts, and searching of databases such as PsycINFO, MEDLINE, SocioFile, Academic Search Premier, and others.

Before any citation is posted online, library staff (myself and my interns) will assign keywords, study designs, age groups, and funding sources, all gathered from the original paper, obtained through an online source or through the good old method of searching the stacks.  Additionally, there will be two types of abstracts available for each citation: a synopsis written for the public (composed in-house by library staff), and a formatted scientific abstract for researchers (composed off-site by graduate students).

When our website is complete, users will be able to navigate through our database either as a parent or a researcher, with advanced searching options available to researchers.  We have also generously been offered the partnership of the Jarg Corporation (http://www.jarg.com/) in designing both a cutting edge cataloging system and search engine that allows users to search semantically, rather than through the typical method of text matching.  When a father wants to learn more about the effects of video games on his 14 year old son, a typical search engine would provide only results containing the text “video game” and “14 year old.”  The Jarg search engine will provide results containing concepts that match the information sought such as video games, Playstation, arcades, adolescents, teenagers, etc.  The hope is to provide users with precise results based on natural language searching.  Look for the CMCH website in early Fall! 

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