United States has 5 National Libraries: Library of Congress, & National Libraries of Medicine, Agriculture, Education and Transportation

 

five books of different colors representing the five national libraries in the United States: agriculture, transportation, education, medicine, and the Library of Congress“Today, we’re asking “How many national libraries are there in the United States?”

For most countries, the answer is usually one.

But the United States actually has five.

In addition to the National Library of Medicine, the other national libraries are the Library of Congress, the National Agricultural Library, the National Library of Education, and the National Transportation Library.

National libraries or libraries established by the government of a country serve as preeminent repositories of information. Often, they include numerous rare, valuable, or significant works and play an important role in the preservation of their countries’ cultures and intellectual traditions.

National libraries are commonly open to the public for research, and while members of the public may not directly check out items, they may be able to obtain them through interlibrary loan. National libraries are also increasingly making their collections available online, as copyright and digitization projects allow.”

Source:  NLM Announcements from the NLM Office of Communications, July 25, 2018.

PubMed is 20 Years Old

PubMed Celebrates its 20th Anniversary! | NLM in Focus

PubMed logo next to lit birthday candles in the shape of the number twentyPubMed was first released two decades ago in January 1996 as an experimental database under the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) retrieval system. The word “experimental” was dropped from the website in April 1997, and on June 26, 1997, a Capitol Hill press conference officially announced free MEDLINE access via PubMed.More information, a brief history can be found here:

https://infocus.nlm.nih.gov/2016/06/30/pubmed-celebrates-its-20th-anniversary

PubMed Celebrates its 20th Anniversary! | NLM in Focus

“PubMed hit the milestone of 26 million citations; over one million citations are added every year.”

 

 

GenBank has reached 200 billion base pairs from > 350,000 spp.

“Almost the number of stars in the Milky Way.” Through this stellar comparison, the National Institutes of Health proudly announced in 2005 that the content of their computerized collection of DNA sequences called GenBank had reached 50 billion bases or units of DNA. Today, it contains far more, over 200 billion bases from over 350,000 different species, making it one of the largest scientific database in the world.

Here is the announcement of the availability of the Nirenberg papers: “GenBank & The Early Years of “Big Data”

http://circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov/2016/03/03/genbank-the-early-years-of-big-data/

“Deciphering the Genetic Code: A 50 Year Anniversary” January, 2015

Marshall Nirenberg in the lab in early 1960’s, when he completed the first summary document of the genetic code — how triplets (DNA sequences) direct amino acids to form proteins.  Pictures of the group and more about the papers are here:

http://circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov/2015/01/21/deciphering-the-genetic-code-a-50-year-anniversary/

A young man in a lab coat and plastic gloves holds up a glass tube in a laboratory.

PubMed Central: Visualizing a Historical Treasure Trove

By Tyler Nix, Kathryn Funk, Jeffrey S. Reznick, and Erin Zellers

“A wealth of medical history awaits your exploration in the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) free and full-text digital archive of journals PubMed Central (PMC)! Known to most of its users as a free, full-text archive of recent biomedical journals, PMC also reaches back in time over two centuries.

An account of centralized health and relief agencies in Massachusetts during the 1918 influenza pandemic; an article by Florence Nightingale on nursing reform; a paper by W. H. R. Rivers on his treatment of “war neuroses” during World War I; a medical case report on America’s 20th president James A. Garfield, following his assassination in 1881; post-World War II thoughts about the future of the Army Medical Library by its director Frank Rogers; and seminal historical research articles aplenty: by Sir Alexander Fleming, on the use of penicillin to fight bacterial infections; by Walter Reed, on the transmission of yellow fever by mosquitoes; and by the bacteriologist Ida A. Bengtson, the first woman to work in the Hygienic Laboratory of the U.S. Public Health Service, the forerunner of the National Institutes of Health.”

Photos, and the article continues here:

http://circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov/2016/02/23/pubmed-central-visualizing-a-historical-treasure-trove/  from 1809+

From NLM Office Of Communications <NLM_OfficeOfCommunications@public.govdelivery.com> 2/23/16

MEDLINE ANNUAL CHANGES/UPDATES

National Library of Medicine Technical Bulletin

This article collects the notable data changes made to MEDLINE during annual National Library of Medicine (NLM) maintenance known as Year-End Processing (YEP) for 2016:

MEDLINE Data Changes — 2016

Tybaert S. NLM Tech Bull. 2015 Nov-Dec;(407):e8.

2015 December 08 [posted]

Brand new concepts include: Autism Spectrum Disorder, Human Embryonic Stem Cells, Olive Oil, Origin of Life, Open Access Publishing, War-Related Injuries, RNAi Therapeutics, and many more terms.  Medline thesaurus terms are remapped when changes occur, so as to include articles under former headings.

Medical Subject Headings for 2016 are now available online

NLM [National Library of Medicine] New files for Nov 10, 2015

*NLM Technical Bulletin, Nov-Dec 2015, 2016 Medical Subject Headings Available for Download  http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/nd15/nd15_2016_mesh_avail.html

NLM Technical Bulletin, Sep-Oct 2015, 2016 MeSH Headings Available in the MeSH Browser [Editor’s note added November 10, 2015]  http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/so15/so15_2016_mesh_browser.html

PubMed Health — A comprehensive online resource about “what works”

“NLM Announces Expansion of PubMed Health

New Resources Create a Comprehensive Online Resource for Clinical Effectiveness Reviews

 

The National Library of Medicine (NLM), the world’s largest medical library and a component of the National Institutes of Health, announces the expansion of the information available from PubMed Health (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/), which provides integrated access to clinical effectiveness reviews.  

NLM’s National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), in partnership with England’s national Centre for Reviews and Dissemination, the Cochrane Collaboration, the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and other agencies in the US and abroad, now makes available more than 18,000 clinical effectiveness reviews via PubMed Health. PubMed Health organizes these clinical effectiveness research results, including full texts as well as summary information, for consumers and clinicians.

Effectiveness studies are essential for informed clinical and consumer decision making. Multiple studies are necessary over time, and interpreting their complex and often conflicting results is a challenge.

Systematic reviews of clinical effectiveness studies address this need with rigorous scientific methodology. However, they are scattered across the biomedical literature and the Web sites of public health agencies around the world that produce many of them. The National Library of Medicine is uniquely positioned to gather these critical clinical resources in one place.

Users of PubMed Health can: 

  • Access the whole comprehensive collection of resources in a single search, including cancer information for consumers and clinicians from the National Cancer Institute
  • See the results of a simultaneous search for reviews in PubMed
  • Refer to consumer medical encyclopedia search results also delivered simultaneously
  • Follow RSS feeds of featured reviews and “Behind Headlines,” which looks at the research behind news stories
  • Learn to make sense of research results in its “Understand clinical effectiveness” and “Behind Headlines” sections
  • Share resources via e-mail and social media with “Add this”

NLM invites you to visit PubMed Health, learn more about the Web site (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/about/) or follow the project on Twitter @PubMedHealth (https://twitter.com/PubMedHealth) to help you keep up with the evidence on healthcare effectiveness.”

Source: NLM New files for the week of Dec 12, 2011 (NLM Announces)

Medical vocabulary changes in PubMed or Medline

Overview of Vocabulary Development and Changes for 2012 MeSH

  • 454 Descriptors added
  • 42 Descriptor terms replaced with more up-to-date terminology
  • 15 Descriptors deleted

Totals by Type of Terminology

  • 26,582 Descriptors
  • 83 Qualifiers
  • 202,066 Supplementary Concept Records (SCRs)

Helpful Links

Please consult the 2012 online Introduction to MeSH for more details. Lists of new and changed vocabulary are available at these links:

MeSH Vocabulary Changes
New Descriptors – 2012
Changed Descriptors – 2012
Deleted Descriptors – 2012
New Descriptors by Tree Subcategory – 2012

Source: NLM New files for the week of Dec 5, 2011

National Library of Medicine adopts auto-complete feature

  “*NLM Technical Bulletin, Nov-Dec 2011, Search Auto-Complete Feature Added to NLM Main Web Site, MedlinePlus and MedlinePlus en Español

  http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/nd11/nd11_mplus_auto_complete.html “

From NLM New files for the week of Nov 7, 2011

NLM-ANNOUNCES@LIST.NIH.GOV

OSTI, the science & technology portal of the U.S. Government

OSTI, the Office of Science and Technology Information is worth bookmarking.  It serves as a portal for most of the federal goverment’s information, reports and data for 18 agencies:

Agriculture,Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health & Human Services, Interior, Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, Library of Congress, National Aeronautics & Space Administration, National Archives & Records Adminstration, National Science Foundation, and the US Government Publications Office.

Terminology and thesauri might help in your information searches.

This site is a gateway to DOE collections at ScienceAccelerator.gov, global science via WorldWideScience.org, scientific research data as an open government initiative, and the OSTIblog.

Much of this, they declare, is outside Google’s purview — in the “deep web.”