US National Library of Medicine

US National Library of Medicine

The US National Library of Medicine (NLM) is the world's largest biomedical library and a branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It is located in Bethesda, Maryland, and was founded in 1836 as the Library of the Office of the Surgeon General of the Army.

History[edit | edit source]

The NLM was originally established to serve the needs of U.S. Army surgeons. In 1956, it was transferred to the Public Health Service and made part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The library was renamed the National Library of Medicine in 1956.

Collections[edit | edit source]

The NLM houses a vast print collection and produces electronic information resources on a wide range of topics. It provides access to biomedical and health information to scientists, health professionals, and the public. The library's collection includes more than 26 million items, including books, journals, technical reports, manuscripts, microfilms, photographs, and images.

Services[edit | edit source]

The NLM provides a variety of services to researchers, health professionals, and the public. These include PubMed, a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics, and PubMed Central, a free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. The NLM also operates the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), which creates public databases in molecular and genomic biology, conducts research in computational biology, develops software tools for analyzing molecular and genomic data, and disseminates biomedical information.