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.

Cardiac cachexia in early literature: a review of research prior to Medline.

Cachexia has been known to physicians since ancient Greek times as a 'signum mali ominis' in various diseases indicating end stage disease and poor quality of life. Cardiac cachexia is recently receiving growing attention as modern treatment options prevent early death from cardiac events and more patients live with chronic compensated heart failure. Nevertheless, observation and clinical documentation of this condition go back as long as medical science itself. Pioneering studies on the reasons and mechanisms of cachexia were performed several decades ago. These studies provide fundamental insights and guidance towards a better understanding of cachexia. This review presents an overview of early thoughts and milestone studies on metabolic abnormalities and cachexia in chronic heart failure.

Medical subject headings used to search the biomedical literature.

The National Library of Medicine's MEDLINE (MEDLARS Online) database was the first database to be searched nationwide via value-added telecommunication networks. Now available on the World Wide Web free of charge from the National Library of Medicine and from many other sources, it is the world's most heavily used medical database. MEDLINE is unique in that each reference to the medical literature is indexed under a controlled vocabulary called Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). These headings are the keys that unlock the medical literature. MeSH multiplies the usefulness of the MEDLINE database and makes it possible to search the medical literature as we do today. This paper commemorates the 40th anniversary of the introduction of MeSH and salutes some of the farsighted persons who conceived and developed the MEDLINE database.

Finding pleasure and history in the Index Medicus.

The author reports on an interesting afternoon spent with an early edition of the Index Medicus, discovering articles written by Osler, Freud and Nascher.

The idea of the library in the twenty-first century.

The fundamental idea of the library must change. The nineteenth-century idea of the library as the embalming of dead genius and the twentieth-century idea of the library as the repository for second-hand knowledge must give way to the idea of the library as the owner and the librarian as the manager of first-hand knowledge. In the coming era of knowledge capitalism, those individuals and organizations will flourish who are able to apply knowledge to create knowledge and to organize it to produce knowledge. The roles of present-day librarians and libraries will begin to differentiate sharply over the next decade. Some must seize the opportunity to participate in the transformation of libraries into online knowledge servers.

[Indices of biomedical bibliography in otolaryngology]. / Repertorios de bibliografía biomédica en otorrinolaringología.

Since 19th century the trends to medical specialization produced an increase of otorhinolaryngological publications. Due to the impossibility for the otorhinolaryngologist to gather all the medical literature, indexes and medical bibliographies have become an essential tool to physicians and medical investigators, helping them to select relevant literature. In the present work we describe the most interesting indexes of biomedical bibliography for the otorhinolaryngologist. Also, we give a list of the seventy most prestigious otorhinolaryngological journals in the world and the repertories in which they are included.

That vision thing.

The 1991 Janet Doe lecturer describes the vision held by the founders of the Medical Library Association of medical information being readily accessible to health professionals no matter how far they were located from major medical centers, and traces the pursuit of this vision to current outreach activities.