An historical overview of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, 1985-2015.

The National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NNLM), established as the Regional Medical Library Program in 1965, has a rich and remarkable history. The network's first twenty years were documented in a detailed 1987 history by Alison Bunting, AHIP, FMLA. This article traces the major trends in the network's development since then: reconceiving the Regional Medical Library staff as a "field force" for developing, marketing, and distributing a growing number of National Library of Medicine (NLM) products and services; subsequent expansion of outreach to health professionals who are unaffiliated with academic medical centers, particularly those in public health; the advent of the Internet during the 1990s, which brought the migration of NLM and NNLM resources and services to the World Wide Web, and a mandate to encourage and facilitate Internet connectivity in the network; and the further expansion of the NLM and NNLM mission to include providing consumer health resources to satisfy growing public demand. The concluding section discusses the many challenges that NNLM staff faced as they transformed the network from a system that served mainly academic medical researchers to a larger, denser organization that offers health information resources to everyone.

Expanding the Legacy: The National Library of Medicine Michael E. DeBakey Lecture in the History of Medicine.

In our 2021 article published in this journal, we described the development, historical significance, and impact of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) Michael E. DeBakey fellowship in the History of Medicine. This article focuses on a key part of the fellowship, the NLM Michael E. DeBakey Lecture in the History of Medicine, by explaining how this annual program advances historical scholarship and promotes awareness of DeBakey's legacy and his support of the world's largest biomedical library, whose collections are appreciated by researchers worldwide. The annual DeBakey Lecture provides a platform for a selected DeBakey fellow to share and expand on their fellowship research, connecting that research and the fellow's story with a global audience through a videocast, a permanently and freely available archived lecture, a research-based blog post, and an associated blog interview. The lectures have covered topics about DeBakey himself, his influence on the world, and new research that reflects his historical interests. The library's support of this impactful program, like the Michael E. DeBakey fellowship overall, testifies to its commitment to expanding the legacy of DeBakey hand in hand with its commitment to serving scientists and society in the 21st century.

[175 years of the National Library of Medicine, of the United States of America: a scientific and cultural treasure worthy of admiration]. / 175 años de la National Library of Medicine, de los EE.UU. de NA: un tesoro científico y cultural digno de admiración.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) of the United States of America, celebrates in 2011 its 175th anniversary. This Library, the largest biomedical library in the world, has a proud and rich history serving the health community and the public, especially since its transfer to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1968. It holds 17 million publications in 150 languages, and has an important collection of ancient and modern historical books as well as original publications of Vesalius and other founders of biomedicine. Its modern document collections illustrate the progress of medical sciences. These collections include laboratory notes from many scientists whose work forms the foundations of contemporary life sciences. The Library also provides several services for health research and for the public, including databases and services such as MedLine and BLAST. The NLM constantly strives to fulfill the information needs of its customers, whether scientists or the public at large. For example, as the Hispanic population of the Unites States has increased in recent years, the NLM has made larger and larger amounts of data available in Spanish to fulfill the health information needs of this population. NLM programs train professionals in library science and biomedical informatics and link biomedical libraries of 18 academic centers throughout the United States. The NLM funds competitive grants for training at the Library, organizing short instruction courses about library science and informatics, and writing books on health related matters including the history of medicine and public health. The NLM is managed and maintained by an outstanding and farsighted group of professionals and dedicated support staff. Their focus on serving and reaching both the biomedical community and the public at large has been crucial to its development into a world icon of biomedical sciences, information technology and the humanities.

Donald A. B. Lindberg: Inspiring Leader and Visionary in Biomedicine, Healthcare, and Informatics.

BACKGROUND: As Director of the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) for 30 years, Dr. Donald A. B. Lindberg was instrumental in bringing biomedical research and healthcare worldwide into the age of genomic and translational medicine through the informatics systems developed by the NLM. Lindberg opened free access and worldwide public dissemination of all the NLM's biomedical literature and databases, thus helping transform not only biomedical research like the Human Genome Project and its successors, but also the practices of medicine and healthcare internationally. Guiding, leading, and teaching-by-example at national, regional, and global levels of biomedical and healthcare informatics, Lindberg helped coalesce a dynamic discipline that provides a foundation for the human understanding which promotes the future health of our world. OBJECTIVES: To provide historical insight into the scientific, technological, and practical clinical accomplishments of Donald Lindberg, and to describe how this led to contributions in the worldwide interdisciplinary evolution of informatics, and its impact on the biosciences and practices of medicine, nursing, and other healthcare-related disciplines. METHODS: Review and comment on the publications, scientific contributions, and leadership of Donald Lindberg in the evolution of biomedical and health informatics which anticipate the vision, scholarship, research in the field, and represent the deeply ethical humanism he exhibited throughout his life. These were essential in producing the informatics systems, such as the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), MEDLINE, PubMed, PubMed Central, and ClinicalTrials.gov, which, together with NLM training programs and conferences, made possible the interactions among researchers and practitioners leading to the past quarter-century of rapid and dramatic advances in biomedical scientific inquiry and clinical discoveries, openly shared across the globe. CONCLUSION: Dr. Lindberg was a uniquely talented physician and pioneering researcher in biomedical and health informatics. As the main leader in developing and funding innovative informatics research for more than 30 years as Director of the National Library of Medicine, he helped bring together the most creative interdisciplinary researchers to bridge the worlds of biomedical research, education, and clinical practice. Lindberg's emphasis on open-access to the biomedical literature through publicly shared computer-mediated methods of search and inquiry are seen as an example of ethical scientific openness.

The great contribution: Index Medicus, Index-Catalogue, and IndexCat.

OBJECTIVE: The systematic indexing of medical literature by the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office (now the National Library of Medicine) has been called "America's greatest contribution to medical knowledge." In the 1870s, the library launched two indexes: the Index Medicus and the Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office. Index Medicus is better remembered today as the forerunner of MEDLINE, but Index Medicus began as the junior partner of what the library saw as its major publication, the Index-Catalogue. However, the Index-Catalogue had been largely overlooked by many medical librarians until 2004, when the National Library of Medicine released IndexCat, the online version of Index-Catalogue. Access to this huge amount of material raised new questions: What was the coverage of the Index-Catalogue? How did it compare and overlap with the Index Medicus? METHOD: Over 1,000 randomly generated Index Medicus citations were cross-referenced in IndexCat. RESULTS: Inclusion, form, content, authority control, and subject headings were evaluated, revealing that the relationship between the two publications was neither simple nor static through time. In addition, the authors found interesting anomalies that shed light on how medical literature was selected and indexed in "America's greatest contribution to medical knowledge."

Laws, leaders, and legends of the modern National Library of Medicine.

PURPOSE: The paper is an expanded version of the 2007 Joseph Leiter National Library of Medicine (NLM)/Medical Library Association Lecture presented at MLA '07, the Medical Library Association annual meeting in Philadelphia in May 2007. It presents an historical accounting of four major pieces of legislation, beginning with the NLM Act of 1956 up through the creation of the National Center for Biotechnology Information. BRIEF DESCRIPTION: The transition from the United States Armed Forces Medical Library to the United States National Library of Medicine in 1956 was a major turning point in NLM's history, scope, and direction. The succeeding landmark legislative achievements--namely, the 1965 Medical Library Assistance Act, the 1968 Joint Resolution forming the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, and the 1988 authorization for the National Center for Biotechnology Information--transformed the library into a major biomedical communications institution and a leader and supporter of an effective national network of libraries of medicine. The leaders of the library and its major advocates--including Dr. Michael DeBakey, Senator Lister Hill, and Senator Claude Pepper-together contributed to the creation of the modern NLM.

Building better connections: the National Library of Medicine and public health.

PURPOSE: The paper describes the expansion of the public health programs and services of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) in the 1990s and provides the context in which NLM's public health outreach programs arose and exist today. BRIEF DESCRIPTION: Although NLM has always had collections and services relevant to public health, the US public health workforce made relatively little use of the library's information services and programs in the twentieth century. In the 1990s, intensified emphases on outreach to health professionals, building national information infrastructure, and promoting health data standards provided NLM with new opportunities to reach the public health community. A seminal conference cosponsored by NLM in 1995 produced an agenda for improving public health access to and use of advanced information technology and electronic information services. NLM actively pursued this agenda by developing new services and outreach programs and promoting public health informatics initiatives. METHOD: Historical analysis is presented. RESULTS/OUTCOME: NLM took advantage of a propitious environment to increase visibility and understanding of public health information challenges and opportunities. The library helped create partnerships that produced new information services, outreach initiatives, informatics innovations, and health data policies that benefit the public health workforce and the diverse populations it serves.

[Elizabeth Fee: a historian reaching out to wider audiences]. / Elizabeth Fee: uma historiadora em busca de audiências mais amplas.

To what activities and topics does a historian in health and medicine, whose articles and books have become fundamental references for scholars of the area, devote her time? Feminism, counter-culture, medical education, global health, the role of international health organizations, and knowledge sharing in the health history are some of the subjects Elizabeth Fee addresses in this interview given at Fiocruz in April where she presented the 2006 inaugural class to the Graduate Program in History of Health Sciences at Casa de Oswaldo Cruz. The topic of her lecture was "The World Health Organization and AIDS: what can we learn from history?"

Knowledge for medicine and health care--laudation at the occasion of the honorary doctorate bestowed to Donald A. B. Lindberg by UMIT, University for Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology in Innsbruck, Tyrol, Austria.

Dr. Donald A. B. Lindberg, Director of the U.S. National Library of Medicine, received an honorary doctorate from UMIT, the University for Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology in Innsbruck, Tyrol. The celebration took place on September 28, 2004 at an academic event during a conference of the Austrian, German, and Swiss Societies of Medical Informatics, GMDS2004. Dr. Lindberg has been a pioneer in the field of computers in health care from the early 1960s onwards. In 1984 he became the Director of the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, the world's largest fully computerized biomedical library. Dr. Lindberg has been involved in the early activities of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA), among others being the chair of the Organizing Committee for MEDINFO 86 in Washington D.C. He was elected the first president of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), and served as an editor of Methods of Information in Medicine.

The National Library of Medicine.

The National Library of Medicine, located in Bethesda, MD, is the largest repository of medical literature in the world. Its vast holdings now comprise 2.3 million volumes and 3.6 million additional items, including manuscripts; photographs, prints, and other pictorial material; and extensive collections of microfilmed and audiovisual records. Today, this world-famous library faces a range of challenges related to the storage of the formidable volume of new material from around the world, the preservation of older documents, and the demand for technology-driven dissemination of information.

History of medicine: the metamorphosis of scientific medicine in the ever-present past.

Hippocrates (460-370 BCE), the father of medicine, developed principles for medical diagnosis and treatment together with a code of ethics. When the first Ptolemy ruled Egypt, he created a great library of 700,000 rolls at Alexandria, which became a repository for the works of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, and all the writings of the known world, but it was destroyed by a great fire. Galen of Pergamum (129-216), who lived 500 years after Hippocrates, was well educated and studied anatomy, surgery, drugs and Hippocratic medicine. His ideas influenced medical thinking for the next 1500 years. The Arabic physician Ibn Sina (Avicenna) wrote a great medical work entitled Canon of Medicine. After the Dark Ages (500 to 1050), academic medicine was reestablished in Europe, especially at Salerno, Bologna, Padua, Paris, Montpellier, and Oxford. The greatest medical disaster of the Middle Ages was the Black Death. Other diseases of note were leprosy, smallpox, tuberculosis, typhus, measles, diarrhea, meningitis, and colic. As interest in human dissection increased, the study of anatomy became popular. With development of the printing press, medical knowledge became more widely disseminated and technical advances in science flourished. Advances in medicine occurred in concert with developments in technology. These included the microscope, the stethoscope, anesthetic agents, discoveries in bacteriology, a carbolic acid spray to reduce infection during surgery, the clinical thermometer, blood transfusions, electrocardiography, X-rays, and the sphygmomanometer. Johns Hopkins University was established at the end of the 19th century to train scientifically knowledgeable physicians. The first faculty included Welch, Osler, Halstead, Kelly, Mall, and Abel. Graduates of the new school carried scientific medicine to universities throughout America. More medical advances have been made during the 20th century than in all the other centuries combined. Advances in medical knowledge have resulted not only from developments in technology but from increased access to current information provided through libraries such as the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.

The Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications.

On August 3, 1968, the Joint Resolution of the Congress established the program and construction of the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications. The facility dedicated in 1980 contains the latest in computer and communications technologies. The history, program requirements, construction management, and general planning are discussed including technical issues regarding cabling, systems functions, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system (HVAC), fire suppression, research and development laboratories, among others.