Laboratory Information:
National Library of Medicine
8600 Rockville Pike
Bethesda, MD 20894
Website: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/
Technology Transfer Website: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/grants.html
Agency/Department: Dept. of Health and Human Services
Region: Mid-Atlantic
FLC Laboratory Representative:
Fred Wood
Phone: 301-402-9278
Fax: (301) 496-4450
Email: fredwood@mail.nih.gov
Background/History of the Laboratory:
The National Library of Medicine (NLM),
on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., 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 8 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 15 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 750 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 (http://medlineplus.gov/), to link the general public to many sources of consumer health
information.
Technology Transfer Mechanisms:
- Grants
- Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR)
