On September 18, the new DeCS (Health Sciences Descriptors) portal was officially launched as part of the celebration of its 34th anniversary. DeCS is the main controlled vocabulary for indexing and retrieving scientific and technical health literature published in the Latin America and Caribbean (LA&C) region.
DeCS is a structured and multilingual vocabulary developed by BIREME from the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) of the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM). BIREME is responsible for translating the descriptors and their synonyms into Portuguese. Spanish translation is done in collaboration with the Medical School of Universidad de Chile, and for Spanish from Spain, with the National Library of Sciences of the Instituto de Salud Carlos III. The French translation is carried out by Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM) (for MeSH terms) and by the Department of Medical Informatics of Université de Rouen-Normandie, both in France (for DeCS exclusive terms).
The event was opened by Dr Diego González, Director of BIREME/PAHO/WHO. The official launch of the new DeCS platform was carried out by Dr Jarbas Barbosa, Assistant Director of PAHO/WHO. Dr. Barbosa highlighted the importance of DeCS in standardizing search terms for researchers, librarians, health professionals and all PAHO and NLM staff.
DeCS has been promoting terminology standards organized hierarchically by concept for 34 years, based on NLM's MeSH, translated into Portuguese, Spanish and French, in addition to the exclusive categories and terms related to the Organization's cross-cutting issues”.
In his presentation, Renato Murasaki, Manager of Methodologies and Information Technologies at BIREME, highlighted the importance of DeCS/MeSH, “it represents themes for organization and information retrieval; allows terminological control to translate the natural language of documents, indexing and using a systemic language and more content; and offers a common language to understand a knowledge domain”.
Next, Dr. Ana Cristina Campos detailed the new portal and some of its features, such as the direct access button to the Virtual Health Library (VHL) portal; the availability of the same content in four languages; accessible content in compliance with W3C accessibility standards and the ability to look for terms in just one search box.
Then, the more than 330 participants from Brazil, Latin American, Spanish and English Caribbean countries, Portugal, Spain, and Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa had the opportunity to ask questions to speakers and comment about the presentations, in addition to writing their observations through from the WebEx platform chat.
Finally, at the end of the session, Dr Sebastián Garcia, Director of the Department of Evidence and Intelligence for Action in Health (EIH), acknowledged not only the BIREME's staff led by Renato Murasaki for the success of the launch, but also to users for their permanent contribution in suggesting descriptors and synonyms, making this a living space with constant evolution, which continues to be enhanced with the aim of improving access to health information. Thanking BIREME and its Director, Dr Diego González, for one more outcome, he declared the new DeCS portal officially launched.
