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Important Events in NLM History
1836—Library of the Office of the Surgeon General of the Army (the present National Library of Medicine) established.
1865—John Shaw Billings, MD, appointed to supervise Surgeon General's Library, which he developed into a national resource of biomedical literature. He served as director until 1895.
1879—First volume of Index Medicus, the first attempt to identify and code the medical literature, published.
1880—First volume of Index-Catalogue, a multi-part printed bibliography, published.
1922—Library of the Office of the Surgeon General (Army) renamed Army Medical Library.
1952—Army Medical Library renamed Armed Forces Medical Library.
1956—Act of Congress moved Armed Forces Medical Library to U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) and renamed it the National Library of Medicine.
1961—New National Library of Medicine building, #38 (8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, Maryland, on the NIH campus), dedicated.
1964—Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System (MEDLARS), a computer-based system for medical professionals to retrieve biomedical information, became operational at NLM.
1965—Medical Library Assistance Act gave NLM responsibility of helping the nation's medical libraries through a grant program and created the Regional Medical Library Network (now the National Network of Libraries of Medicine).
1968—NLM became a component of NIH. The Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, NLM's research and development component, created by Congress.
1971—MEDLINE ("MEDLARS Online") initiated to provide online access to a subset of references in the MEDLARS database.
1972—TOXLINE, an online bibliographic service covering pharmacology and toxicology, became operational.
1980—NLM's Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, building #38A, dedicated. Adjacent to the Library, it houses NLM's research and development components.
1986—Grateful Med, user-friendly software for accessing MEDLARS, introduced to the health community.
1988—The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) established at NLM by Congress as a national resource for molecular biology information.
1992—NCBI assumed responsibility for GenBank and US participation in the International Nucleotide Sequence Consortium.
1993—National Information Center on Health Services Research and Health Care Technology established at NLM by Congress as a national resource for health services research and evidence-based practice guidelines.
1993—NLM's website (www.nlm.nih.gov) appeared.
1994—The Visible Human Male, a large computer dataset of images based on a cadaver, was introduced. The Visible Human Female appeared one year later.
1997—Access to NLM's MEDLINE/PubMed database became free via the World Wide Web.
1998—MedlinePlus released, providing access to consumer health information.
2000—ClinicalTrials.gov, an online resource to give the public easy access to information about research studies, launched.
2000—PubMed Central (PMC), a free archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, launched.
2002—NLM launched traveling historical exhibition program with release of Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature.
2003—NLM released standard format for electronic archiving and publishing of journal articles—the journal article tagging suite or JATS, which later became a national standard.
2004—The Secretary of HHS designated NLM as the HHS Coordinating Body for Clinical Terminology Standards.
2006—NIH MedlinePlus magazine launched to provide Americans with reliable, current health information in a consumer-friendly format. The Spanish-English version, Salud, followed two years later.
2006—dbGaP, the database of genomes and phenomes, launched to provide access genome-wide association studies.
2006—DailyMed made FDA-approved electronic structured product labels (drug package inserts) available to the public and system developers.
2008—NIH public access policy, requiring deposit in PMC of peer-reviewed articles resulting from NIH-funded research became mandatory, as specified in 2008 appropriations law.
2008—Deposit of summary results data in ClinicalTrials.gov became mandatory for selected clinical trials of FDA-regulated drugs and devices, as specified in the FDA Amendments Act of 2007.
2010—MedlinePlus Connect, a service linking patients or providers in electronic health record (EHR) systems to related MedlinePlus information on conditions or medications, released.
2010—Vocabulary standards supported or developed by NLM (LOINC, RxNorm, SNOMED CT) included in rule specifying U.S. certification criteria for electronic health record systems.
2015—AccessGUDID made medical device information submitted to the FDA available to the public.
2015—Other HHS agencies and other Federal Departments elected to require deposit of publications resulting from their funded research into PMC.
2016—Patricia Flatley Brennan, RN, PhD, became the first woman and first nurse appointed to head the Library.
2017—HHS issued final rule for registration and reporting of summary results of clinical trials at ClinicalTrials.gov. NIH issued policy extending the requirements to all NIH-funded clinical trials.
2017—NLM launched its Strategic Plan 2017-2027: A Platform for Biomedical Discovery and Data-Powered Health
2019—NIH MedlinePlus magazine became available in both English and Spanish online.
2019—NLM’s Sequence Read Archive (SRA) public data moved to the cloud, completing the first phase of an ongoing effort to better position these data for large-scale computing.
2020—NLM launched an updated version of PubMed, providing an enhanced design and technology to improve the user experience.
NLM Legislative Chronology
August 3, 1956—An amendment to Title III of the Public Health Service Act, the National Library of Medicine Act, placed the Armed Forces Medical Library under the PHS, and renamed it the National Library of Medicine (Public Law 84-941).
October 22, 1965—The Medical Library Assistance Act of 1965 (Public Law 89-291) authorized NLM's extramural programs of grant assistance to help expand and improve the nation's medical library and health communications resources, technology, and professional staff for service to the health community.
August 3, 1968—Public Law 90-456 authorized the designation of the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications.
November 4, 1988—Health Omnibus Programs Extension Act (Public Law 100-607) authorized establishment of the National Center for Biotechnology Information at NLM.
June 10, 1993—National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act (Public Law 103-43) authorized establishment of the National Information Center on Health Services Research and Health Care Technology at NLM.
November 21, 1997—The Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act (Public Law 105-115) called for the creation of a centralized, consumer-friendly online listing of clinical trials, which became ClinicalTrials.gov.
September 27, 2007—The Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act (Public Law 111-85) extended the scope of clinical trials to be registered at ClinicalTrials.gov and expanded the data bank to include summary results of completed clinical trials.