The Daily Dose Presents: The National Library of Medicine | bschillace

"In the past few weeks, we have been featuring various museum and library collections, and today I have the pleasure of presenting the National Library of Medicine. An agency of the United States government, the NLM is a component of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), one of the world’s foremost public research centers. The NLM itself is the world’s largest biomedical library with a collection of over twelve million books, journals, manuscripts, audiovisuals, and other forms of medical information. 2011 marked its 175th anniversary, and the Library continues to be a valuable resource for the researcher, the writer, and the intrepid and curious soul. Even Mary Roach (award-winning author of Gulp and Stiff) considers the collection a kind of 'fantasy holiday,' a place when our medical past connects to our present and our future.  Not only is the NLM the world’s largest biomedical library, it also hosts comprehensive electronic resources on a wide range of topics searchable from around the globe. Why is that important? Well, as expressed in the recent DD series Digital Collections, online archives are one of the fastest-growing means of connecting museum and library collections to a waiting and eager public. We are a global community, and these online centers – and corresponding blogs and RSS or twitter feeds – have become the watering holes for a dispersed public interested in the origins and development of our shared medical history. The past is not dead; it is alive with stories, a living compendium composed of images, words, texts, voices ... During the past three decades, the NLM has come to have global influence through developing electronic information services that deliver trillions of bytes of data to millions of users every day, including consumer health information, drug information, clinical trials data, genetic/genomic data, and toxicology and environmental data. Scientists, scholars, educators, health professionals, and the general public in the United States and around the world search these and the NLM’s many other information resources more than one billion times each year ... The new blog of the NLM’s History of Medicine Division, Circulating Now, complements the broader history of the Library in important ways. The very name of the blog is significant: for over 175 years the NLM’s historical collections have circulated to generations within the reading rooms of its various locations in and around Washington, DC. Now, these collections—as part of the vast data produced and delivered by the NLM—circulate daily to millions of people around the world. Circulating Now sustains the tradition and commitment of the NLM, and libraries everywhere, to provide knowledge and expertise freely and to inspire people and enrich lives. Circulating Now also conveys the vitality of medical history in our 21st-century world: its relevance and importance for research, teaching, and learning about the human condition. And Circulating Now evokes the living quality of the NLM’s historical collections and the stories they offer about the experience of health and disease here in the United States and around the world.  Today, I have asked Jeff Reznick, Chief of NLM’s History of Medicine Division, to join us and speak a bit about the NLM and this new digital platform ..."