Crafting the third century of the National Library of Medicine

Abstract

In 20 years the National Library of Medicine (NLM) will enter its third century of service to the nation. From a small bookshelf in the office of an army surgeon to a dynamic suite of resources for discovery and care, the NLM assures that the information needed for discovery and care is available where needed, when needed, and, increasingly, in the format needed. This week I begin my tenure as the 19th appointed director of the NLM. I am using this opportunity to reach out to colleagues in the biomedical and health informatics community to solicit your guidance about how to invest in and grow the NLM. What kind of library and library services are needed to determine whether a foodborne pathogen is a new species or a known species? How many infrastructure standards, predictive algorithms, natural language processing–guided tumor interpretations, and vocabulary cross-mappings must be in place to support an automated query soliciting the next step in cancer screening for a specific patient in a given community? Is it possible to describe and …