National Library of Medicine

The National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the NIH in Bethesda, Md., is the world's largest medical library, collecting materials in all areas of biomedicine and providing health information to the biomedical community and the lay public.

R&D is conducted at the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications (LHNCBC) and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). LHNCBC applies advanced technologies to improve the organization, dissemination and utilization of biomedical information. Research in biomedical image processing, document image analysis, multimedia databases, and natural language processing, yield practical solutions for automated creation of bibliographic databases, digital preservation, biomedical multimedia libraries, animated virtual versions of historic books, telemedicine and other NLM mission objectives.

Through research in computational molecular biology, NCBI develops tools and systems for the management and dissemination of genome information, e.g., GenBank, a collection of all known DNA sequences, providing access to Human Genome data.