Aidy Weeks and Stephanie Fell (Libraries) gave an invited presentation titled, “Hispanic/Latinx Inclusive Terminologies Project” as representatives of the Medical Subject Headings Project Team before the National Institutes of Health Interest Group for Adding Ethnic Minorities to MeSH. Medical Subject Headings is the controlled vocabulary thesaurus for the National Library of Medicine.
The Hispanic/Latinx Inclusive Terminologies Project was in response to a series of calls to action by the Medical Library Association's Latinx Caucus in the summer of 2020. This year-long, 16-member endeavor included two project teams that reviewed Hispanic/Latinx terminology specific to the United States to create comprehensive search hedges and address expansion and restructuring of medical subject heading controlled vocabulary. Ruby Nugent, assistant professor, Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV Library, and Rebecca Orozco, assistant professor and sciences librarian, served as additional project leaders. Mayra Corn, assistant professor and undergraduate medical education liaison librarian and technology manager at the School of Medicine Library, and Erika Abad, assistant professor-in-residence, gender and sexuality studies, served as project contributor and subject matter expert, respectively. Weeks is an assistant professor and the interim director of the School of Medicine Library, and Fell is an assistant professor and the specialized collections catatog librarian.
