National Library of Medicine
Seal of the National Library of Medicine
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Logo of the National Library of Medicine
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 National Library of Medicine in 1999 |
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| Agency overview | |
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| Formed | 1836 as the Library of the Office of the Surgeon General of the Army |
| Headquarters |
Bethesda, Maryland, United States 38°59′45″N 77°05′56″W / 38.995951°N 77.098832°WCoordinates: 38°59′45″N 77°05′56″W / 38.995951°N 77.098832°W |
| Annual budget | $341,119,000 |
| Agency executive |
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| Parent agency | National Institutes of Health |
| Website | www |
The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), operated by the United States federal government, is the world's largest medical library.
Located in Bethesda, Maryland, the NLM is an institute within the National Institutes of Health. Its collections include more than seven million books, journals, technical reports, manuscripts, microfilms, photographs, and images on medicine and related sciences, including some of the world's oldest and rarest works.
The current director of the NLM is Patricia Flatley Brennan.
Since 1879, the National Library of Medicine has published the Index Medicus, a monthly guide to articles in nearly five thousand selected journals. The last issue of Index Medicus was printed in December 2004, but this information is offered in the freely accessible PubMed, among the more than fifteen million MEDLINE journal article references and abstracts going back to the 1960s and 1.5 million references going back to the 1950s.
The National Library of Medicine also runs the National Center for Biotechnology Information, which houses biological databases (PubMed among them) that are freely accessible on the Internet through the Entrez search engine.
The Toxicology and Environmental Health Program was established at the National Library of Medicine in 1967 and is charged with developing computer databases compiled from the medical literature and from the files of governmental and nongovernmental organizations. The program has implemented several information systems for chemical emergency response and public education, such as the Toxicology Data Network, TOXMAP, Tox Town, Wireless Information System for Emergency Responders, Toxmystery, and the Household Products Database. These resources are accessible without charge on the internet.
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