The National Library of Medicine and future of medical databases

Abstract

The National Library of Medicine （NLM） was originally established in 1836 as the Library of the Army Surgeon General's Office. NLM today is the world's largest research library in a single scientific field, it's extensive collections and information services are indispensable to all health professionals, researchers and general public. MEDLARS is the computerized system of databases and databanks offered by NLM reside over 40 online databases containing about 18 million references. As NLM saw an increasing role for electronically represented images in clinical medicine and biomedical research, its bibliographic and factual database services would be complemented by libraries of digital images, distributed over high speed computer networks and by high capacity physical media. The goal is to make the print library and the image library a single, unified resource for medical information. In order to consider the future directions on medical databases in Japan, the current situations on research activities and database services in NLM were reviewed.