Latest
Resources
Most
PopularNational Library of Medicine
Visit http://nlm.nih.gov
The National Library of Medicine (NLM), on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, is the world's largest medical library. The Library collects materials in all areas of biomedicine and health care, as well as works on biomedical aspects of technology, the humanities, and the physical, life, and social sciences. The collections stand at more than 9 million items--books, journals, technical reports, manuscripts, microfilms, photographs and images. Housed within the Library is one of the world's finest medical history collections of old and rare medical works. The Library's collection may be consulted in the reading room or requested on interlibrary loan. NLM is a national resource for all U.S. health science libraries through a National Network of Libraries of Medicine®.
For 125 years, the Library published the Index Medicus®, a monthly subject/author guide to articles in 4000 journals. This information, and much more, is today available in the database MEDLINE®, the major component of PubMed®, freely accessible via the World Wide Web. PubMed has more than 16 million MEDLINE journal article references and abstracts going back to the mid-1960's with another 1.5 million references back to the early 1950's. NLM plans to add more references back through time.Other databases provide information on monographs (books), audiovisual materials, and on such specialized subjects as toxicology, environmental health, and molecular biology. Through the Web at http://www.nlm.nih.gov some 900 million searches of MEDLINE are done each year by health professionals, scientists, librarians, and the public. There are increasing links between article references and full text, and a new service called PubMed Central allows free access to a central repository of journal articles. The NLM has created a special Web site, MedlinePlus, to link the general public to many sources of consumer health information.