The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), operated by the United States federal government, is the world's largest

medical library A health or medical library is designed to assist physicians, health professionals, students, patients, consumers, medical researchers, and information specialists in finding health and scientific information to improve, update, assess, or eval ...

. Located in

Bethesda, Maryland Bethesda () is an unincorporated, census-designated place in southern Montgomery County, Maryland. It is located just northwest of Washington, D.C. It takes its name from a local church, the Bethesda Meeting House (1820, rebuilt 1849), which i ...

, the NLM is an institute within the

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late 1 ...

. Its collections include more than seven million

book A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many page (paper), pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bookbinding, bound together and protected by a book cover, cover. Th ...

s, journals,

technical report A technical report (also scientific report) is a document that describes the process, progress, or results of technical or scientific research or the state of a technical or scientific research problem. It might also include recommendations and co ...

manuscript A manuscript (abbreviated MS for singular and MSS for plural) was, traditionally, any document written by hand – or, once practical typewriters became available, typewritten – as opposed to mechanically printed or reproduced in ...

microfilm Microforms are scaled-down reproductions of documents, typically either films or paper, made for the purposes of transmission, storage, reading, and printing. Microform images are commonly reduced to about 4% or of the original document size. F ...

photograph A photograph (also known as a photo, image, or picture) is an image created by light falling on a photosensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic image sensor, such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are now created ...

s, and images on medicine and related sciences, including some of the world's oldest and rarest works. The current director of the NLM is Patricia Flatley Brennan.National Library of Medicine Welcomes New Director Dr. Patricia Flatley Brennan
. ''National Library of Medicine''. August 15, 2016.

History

The precursor of the National Library of Medicine, established in 1836, was the Library of the Surgeon General's Office, a part of the office of the Surgeon General of the United States Army. The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and its Medical Museum were founded in 1862 as the Army Medical Museum. Throughout their history the Library of the Surgeon General's Office and the Army Medical Museum often shared quarters. From 1866 to 1887, they were housed in

Ford's Theatre Ford's Theatre is a theater located in Washington, D.C., which opened in August 1863. The theater is infamous for being the site of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. On the night of April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth entered the theater box ...

after production there was stopped, following the assassination of President

Abraham Lincoln Abraham Lincoln ( ; February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was an American lawyer, politician, and statesman who served as the 16th president of the United States from 1861 until his assassination in 1865. Lincoln led the nation throu ...

. In 1956, the library collection was transferred from the control of the U.S. Department of Defense to the

Public Health Service In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the ''Öffentlichke ...

of the

Department of Health, Education, and Welfare The United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is a cabinet-level executive branch department of the U.S. federal government created to protect the health of all Americans and providing essential human services. Its motto is " ...

and renamed the National Library of Medicine, through the instrumentality of

Frank Bradway Rogers Frank Bradway Rogers (December 31, 1914 – July 27, 1987) was a medical doctor and librarian who was instrumental in changing the Army Medical Library into the National Library of Medicine. He helped develop an electronic system of storing and ...

, who was the director from 1956 to 1963. The library moved to its current quarters in

, on the campus of the National Institutes of Health, in 1962.

Publications and informational resources

Since 1879, the National Library of Medicine has published the

Index Medicus ''Index Medicus'' (''IM'') is a curated subset of MEDLINE, which is a bibliographic database of life science and biomedical science information, principally scientific journal articles. From 1879 to 2004, ''Index Medicus'' was a comprehensive ...

, a monthly guide to articles, in nearly five thousand selected journals. The last issue of Index Medicus was printed in December 2004, but this information is offered in the freely accessible

PubMed PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health maintain th ...

, among the more than fifteen million

MEDLINE MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online, or MEDLARS Online) is a bibliographic database of life sciences and biomedical information. It includes bibliographic information for articles from academic journals covering medi ...

journal article references and abstracts going back to the 1960s and 1.5 million references going back to the 1950s. The National Library of Medicine runs the

National Center for Biotechnology Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is part of the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), a branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It is approved and funded by the government of the United States. T ...

, which houses

biological database Biological databases are libraries of biological sciences, collected from scientific experiments, published literature, high-throughput experiment technology, and computational analysis. They contain information from research areas including genom ...

s (PubMed among them) that are freely accessible on the Internet through the

Entrez The Entrez (pronounced ''ɒnˈtreɪ'') Global Query Cross-Database Search System is a federated search engine, or web portal that allows users to search many discrete health sciences databases at the National Center for Biotechnology Information ( ...

search engine and Lister Hill National Center For Biomedical Communications. As the United States National Release Center for

SNOMED CT SNOMED CT or SNOMED Clinical Terms is a systematically organized computer-processable collection of medical terms providing codes, terms, synonyms and definitions used in clinical documentation and reporting. SNOMED CT is considered to be the m ...

, NLM provides SNOMED CT data and resources to licensees of the NLM

UMLS The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is a compendium of many controlled vocabularies in the biomedical sciences (created 1986). It provides a mapping structure among these vocabularies and thus allows one to translate among the various term ...

Metathesaurus. NLM maintains ClinicalTrials.gov registry for human interventional and observational studies. Additionally NLM runs ChemIDplus which is a

chemical database A chemical database is a database specifically designed to store chemical information. This information is about chemical and crystal structures, spectra, reactions and syntheses, and thermophysical data. Types of chemical databases Bioactiv ...

of over 400,000

chemical A chemical substance is a form of matter having constant chemical composition and characteristic properties. Some references add that chemical substance cannot be separated into its constituent elements by physical separation methods, i.e., wit ...

s complete with names, synonyms, and structures. It includes links to NLM and other databases and resources, including links to federal, state and international agencies.

Toxicology and environmental health

The Toxicology and Environmental Health Program was established at the National Library of Medicine in 1967 and is charged with developing computer databases compiled from the medical literature and from the files of governmental and nongovernmental organizations.Toxicology and Environmental Health Program
. ''National Library of Medicine''. Retrieved July 11, 2007. The program has implemented several information systems for chemical emergency response and public education, such as the Toxicology Data Network,

TOXMAP TOXMAP was a geographic information system (GIS) from the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) that was deprecated on December 16, 2019. The application used maps of the United States to help users explore data from the United States ...

Tox Town Tox or TOX may refer to: Science and technology * TOX, a protein encoded by the TOX gene * Tox screen, medical diagnostic screening for toxic substances Computing * Tox (protocol), peer-to-peer instant messaging software * tox (Python testing w ...

, Wireless Information System for Emergency Responders, Toxmystery, and the Household Products Database. These resources are accessible without charge on the internet.

Radiation exposure

The United States National Library of Medicine Radiation Emergency Management SystemRadiation Emergency Management System
. ''National Library of Medicine''. provides: * Guidance for health care providers, primarily physicians, about clinical diagnosis and treatment of radiation injury during radiological and nuclear emergencies * Just-in-time, evidence-based, usable information with sufficient background and context to make complex issues understandable to those without formal radiation medicine expertise * Web-based information that may be downloaded in advance, so that it would be available during an emergency if the Internet were not accessible Radiation Emergency Management System is produced by the United States Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, Office of Planning and Emergency Operations, in cooperation with the

National Library of Medicine The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), operated by the United States federal government, is the world's largest medical library. Located in Bethesda, Maryland, the NLM is an institute within the National Institutes of Health. Its ...

, Division of Specialized Information Services, with subject matter experts from the

National Cancer Institute The National Cancer Institute (NCI) coordinates the United States National Cancer Program and is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is one of eleven agencies that are part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. ...

, the

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the national public health agency of the United States. It is a United States federal agency, under the Department of Health and Human Services, and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georg ...

, and many U.S. and international consultants.

Extramural division

The Extramural Division provides grants to support research in medical information science and to support planning and development of computer and communications systems in medical institutions. Research, publications, and exhibitions on the history of medicine and the life sciences also are supported by the History of Medicine Division. In April 2008 the current exhibition Against the Odds: Making a Difference in Global Health was launched.

National Center for Biotechnology Information division

is an intramural division within National Library of Medicine that creates public databases in molecular biology, conducts research in

computational biology Computational biology refers to the use of data analysis, mathematical modeling and computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer science, biology, and big data, the field also has fou ...

, develops software tools for analyzing molecular and genomic data, and disseminates biomedical information, all for the better understanding of processes affecting human health and disease.

References

External links

*
''A Brief History of NLM''

Clinical Trials
research information
HIV Info
treatment and clinical trial information
History of Medicine Division: Finding Aids
a discovery service {{DEFAULTSORT:United States National Library Of Medicine Medical libraries

Medicine Medicine is the science and Praxis (process), practice of caring for a patient, managing the diagnosis, prognosis, Preventive medicine, prevention, therapy, treatment, Palliative care, palliation of their injury or disease, and Health promotion ...

Library of Medicine Libraries in Maryland Bibliographic database providers Buildings and structures in Bethesda, Maryland

Libraries established in 1836 1830s establishments in Washington, D.C. 1836 establishments in the United States Library buildings completed in 1962 1962 establishments in Maryland Research libraries in the United States Chemical databases