The National Library of Medicine

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) helps you find answers to all your health care questions. The NLM's medical library collection has more than 8 million books, photographs, microfilms, journals and other items. It's a resource for health care, biomedicine, and the humanities, technology and science as it they relate to biomedicine. NLM offers a website call MedlinePlus that is one service of the NLM to direct you to the information to help answer health questions. This website also has extensive information about drugs, an illustrated medical encyclopedia, interactive patient tutorials, and latest health news. NLM is located on the campus of the national institutes of health in Bethesda in Maryland and it's the largest medical library in the world. There are the rarest medical works and the oldest medical history collections inside this library. The library offers a reading room for convenience or items can be requested through the interlibrary loan system. The National Library of Medicine once published a monthly guide to the articles in five thousand journals. The guide called Index Medicus was begun in 1879. The final issue was published in December 2004. The information is now offered at its website call PubMed.

In February 2003, the NLM launched a virtual customer service representative named Cosmo. Cosmo is a navigation tool used to guide customers to information on the NLM web site. Users can get help finding information on consumer health, drug facts, medical databases, grant information and the online catalog access. The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is run by NLM. The NCBI houses the biological databases accessible through the internet's Entrez search engine.

The Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications (LHNCBC) along with NCBI carries out the research and development for NLM. They explore the use of computers, communications and audiovisual technologies to improve biomedical information. NLM is a valuable resource for the publics health information needs.

Another interesting institute in United States is the Institute of Medicine (IOM). It's one of the United States national academies that chartered in 1970. It's also a non profit making and non government organization. The objective of this institute is to give advice on medicine, biomedicine issues and health. The members of this IOM are selected based on their background like professional ability and achievements. IOM works in a several categories such as mental health, aging, women's health, children's health. It also includes other fields such as medicine, nutrition education and diseases. This institute mostly works on committee studies and reports of above categories.

Moreover, there is also some medicine college like Baylor College of Medicine that is one of the leading centers for biomedical research. This center is located in Houston Texas of United States with area 1,000 acre with 46 member institutions. There are 14 types of PhD programs offered such as neuroscience, molecular and biochemistry biology, immunology and cardiovascular sciences. It also includes graduate program of nurse anesthesia, residency training and physician assistant program. So it's one of famous medicine library because there are lots of research and studies of medicines in there.