The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), operated by the

United States federal government The federal government of the United States (U.S. federal government or U.S. government) is the national government of the United States, a federal republic located primarily in North America, composed of 50 states, a city within a fe ...

, 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 evalu ...

. 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 in ...

, 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 ...

. 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 pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arr ...

journal A journal, from the Old French ''journal'' (meaning "daily"), may refer to: *Bullet journal, a method of personal organization *Diary, a record of what happened over the course of a day or other period *Daybook, also known as a general journal, a ...

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 c ...

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 printing, printed or repr ...

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

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 create ...

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 Patricia Flatley Brennan is the director of the National Library of Medicine. Prior to that, she was the Lillian L. Moehlman Bascom Professor, School of Nursing and College of Engineering, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Brennan received ...

.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 The Library of the Surgeon General's Office, later called the Army Medical Library, was the institutional medical literature repository of the U.S. Army Surgeon General from 1836 to 1956 when it was transformed into the National Library of Medic ...

, a part of the office of the Surgeon General of the United States Army. The

Armed Forces Institute of Pathology The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) (1862 – September 15, 2011) was a U.S. government institution concerned with diagnostic consultation, education, and research in the medical specialty of pathology. Overview It was founded in ...

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 bo ...

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 thro ...

. In 1956, the library collection was transferred from the control of the

U.S. Department of Defense The United States Department of Defense (DoD, USDOD or DOD) is an executive branch department of the federal government charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government directly related to national secur ...

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 ''Öffentlichkei ...

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 the ...

, 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 medic ...

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. The ...

, 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 geno ...

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 Lister or Lyster may refer to: Names * Lister (surname), also Lyster and Litster * Lyster Kirkpatrick (1885–1921), Australian rules footballer * Lyster Hoxie Dewey (1865–1944), American botanist * Joseph Lister (1827–1912), British physic ...

. 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 mo ...

, 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 termi ...

Metathesaurus. NLM maintains

ClinicalTrials.gov ClinicalTrials.gov is a registry of clinical trials. It is run by the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health, and is the largest clinical trials database, holding registrations from over 329,000 tri ...

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 Bioactivi ...

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., wi ...

s complete with names, synonyms, and

structures A structure is an arrangement and organization of interrelated elements in a material object or system, or the object or system so organized. Material structures include man-made objects such as buildings and machines and natural objects such as ...

. 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 The Hazardous Substances Data Bank (HSDB) is a toxicology database on the U.S. National Library of Medicine's (NLM) Toxicology Data Network (TOXNET). It focuses on the toxicology of potentially hazardous chemicals, and includes information on hu ...

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,

Wireless Information System for Emergency Responders Wireless Information System for Emergency Responders (WISER) is a system to assist first responders in identification of hazardous materials during a response. The system was created by the United States National Library of Medicine. Capabilities ...

, 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 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 ...

, 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, Georgi ...

, 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 fo ...

, 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 practice of caring for a patient, managing the diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, treatment, palliation of their injury or disease, and promoting their health. Medicine encompasses a variety of health care pract ...

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