UCLA Information Center for Integrative East-West Medicine
The UCLA Information Center for Integrative East-West Medicine is a project that involves a collaboration among the UCLA Center for East-West Medicine, the UCLA Library System, and the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences (CACMS), the preeminent institution in this field inChina. The Information Center aims to become the foremost virtual library and collaborative repository of information on integrative medicine, and will provide current, comprehensive, and interdisciplinary information access and services to medical professionals and researchers in the fields related to the integration of Chinese and western medicine.
This will advance understanding of Chinese medicine and integrative medicine and promote multidisciplinary, multimedia, multi-formatted, and multilingual resources in the field of integrative medicine.
One of our long-term goals is to train clinical information specialists who can assist clinicians, researchers, and educators by synthesizing knowledge from these two healing traditions. The Information Center will have a significant and lasting impact in the field of medicine.
Our ultimate goals for the Information Center are:
- To be a unique information hub and service center for integrative medicine and traditional Chinese medicine, providing bilingual or multilingual information in English, Chinese, or other East Asian languages.
- To provide customized and specialized information services through database retrieval, information analysis, consultation with experts, and other research methods as appropriate.
- To serve as training ground for information professionals for the field of integrative medicine.
In September 2008, Professor Weiyu Fan, Researcher/Professor at the Institute of Information on Traditional Chinese Medicine of the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences arrived in Los Angeles. She has a degree in TCM from Beijing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, a strong understanding of western medicine, was a World Health Organization Fellow in Library Science at the University of Washington, and is one of the best medical informationists in China.
By the time Professor Fan left in September 2009, the Information Center was much more advanced than had been envisioned. Professor Fan compiled a 43-page guide to integrative medicine resources in the U.S. and China. This guide, “Searching for Integrative Medicine Resources,” is an extensive roadmap that will greatly facilitate research in integrative medicine. Professor Fan will continue to be involved in this work, now that she has returned to the Institute of Information of the Academy.