Posts tagged ‘NNLM’
National Library of Medicine Celebrates 175 Years
What we now know as the National Library of Medicine (NLM) began with a small collection of medical books in 1836 and was established initially as the Library of the Surgeon General’s Office. Surgeon General Lieutenant John Shaw Billings in the early 1860′s increased the size of the collections by asking physicians and libraries across the United States for donations in addition to asking State Department officers to bring international medical texts back from their overseas assignments. Billings also established the Index Catalog in 1870 and thus initiated an important mission of NLM, that of acquiring, organizing, and describing the world’s medical literature, a mission that is carried on today as PubMed and a variety of other specialized databases and services. (more…)
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