Abstract
Nearsighted? farsighted? pragmatic? idealistic? “Charting a Course for the 21st Century”: the National Library of Medicine's long-range plan, 2006–2016
Highlights
What was achieved by bringing together diverse groups of experts in the sciences, librarianship, education, and information technology to speculate on what the future will be like? What happened when over two hundred of these individuals shared their perspectives to assist the National Library of Medicine (NLM) in identifying its strategic directions over the past twenty plus years? Did the resulting documents showcase precedent-setting plans to address the future faced by a variety of organizations? Did these documents feature a practical blueprint that can be used as evidence when seeking funds to support a highly complex government agency?
How does NLM create an effective plan that will resonate with the large, diverse audiences served by NLM and that will be funded by a large complex government entity? This was the challenge facing newly appointed NLM Director Donald A
Over one hundred dedicated individuals participated on five panels covering the following domains: (1) building and organizing NLM’s collection, (2) locating and gaining access to medical and scientific literature, (3) obtaining factual information from databases, (4) using medical informatics, and (5) assisting health professions education through information technology
Summary
What was achieved by bringing together diverse groups of experts in the sciences, librarianship, education, and information technology to speculate on what the future will be like? The first NLM long-range planning process began in 1985 and described a twenty-year window of activities and directions (1986– 2006) based on the exponential growth in medical literature, revolutionary concepts in molecular biology, and burgeoning set of technology advances in telecommunications, computing capacity, digital storage systems, and knowledge representation tools.
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