"National Library of Medicine"

in Encyclopedia of Global Health (forthcoming, 2008)

THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE (NLM) is the library of the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) and is located on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland. It is the largest medical library in the world. 


The first Surgeon General of the Army, Dr. Joseph Lovell, set up a shelf of medical books in his office when he took his post in 1818. But the National Library of Medicine traces its roots to 1836, with the formal  creation of the Library of the Office of the Surgeon General of the Army. The collection grew haphazardly until 867, when the Army assigned a young doctor named John Shaw Billings to oversee the creation of a comprehensive medical library. Dr Billings was a bibliophile, and by the time he left to head the New York Public Library in 1895, he had grown the collection from a paltry 2,300 volumes to over 124,000 volumes. He was the first to create a catalog of the library's holdings, and in 1879 launched the Index Medicus®, a  bibliographical bulletin of medical journals that would be published for the next 125 years.  


The library was renamed over the decades, becoming the Army Medical Library in 1922, the Armed Forced Medical Library in 1952, and finally, the National Library of Medicine in 1956. In 1962, under the watchful eyes of a group of armed security guards, the collection was moved into its own building on the NIH grounds. Built at the height of the Cold War, it was built with extra-thick concrete walls, a collapsible roof, and an underground storage facility for the more precious books and documents. 


Today, NLM maintains a library of over 8.5 million items, most of them focusing on medicine,

healthcare and the biomedical aspects of the humanities, social sciences and other disciplines.  It has a staff of 640 and its 2005 budget was $331.4 million. To fulfill its goal of giving medical professionals access to the latest information avaliable, it has designed the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM), a consortium with 8 regional libraries, an nearly 5,000 smaller resource and primary access libraries in medical schools and hospitals nationwide. 


The NLM has invested heavily in computer database technology since the 1960s. In 1997, they unveiled MEDLINE, giving researchers access to more than 16.5 million bibliographic records and abstracts dating back to the 1950s. The site receives 750 million searches annually. A year later, they launched MedlinePlus, a consumer-oriented site providing basic medical information and links to reputable information sources that now receives over 1 billion hits a year. Altogether, NLM maintains 86 separate databases, including ClinicalTrials.gov, TOXNET, AIDSInfo and the Visible Human Project, an online, three-dimensional look at the human body. 


While striving to be the most up-to-date collection possible, its archival holdings are considered among the finest repositories of rare medical texts in the world.  It contains more that 500,000 printed pieces, ranging from single sheets to bound books. An estimated 70,000 items date to the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries; the small Islamic collection has items as old as the 11th Century.  The Manuscripts Collections contain 1 million primary source items, and the Prints & Photographs Collection more than 100,000 items. This collection is maintained by the History of Medicine Division (HMD). 
 


SOURCES:

"Milestones in NLM History Factsheet," Office of Communications and Public Liaison,

National Library of Medicine, 2006. (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/about/nlmhist.html) 

"The National Library of Medicine Factsheet," Office of Communications and Public Liaison,

National Library of Medicine, 2006. (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/nlm.html) 

"The NN/LM Factsheet," Office of Communications and Public Liaison,

National Library of Medicine (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/nnlm.html 

"The Story of NLM Historical Collections" (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/about/collectionhistory.html)