Trends in Modernization at the Nation's Medical Library.

This manuscript describes the ongoing efforts to meet ever-changing patron needs by modernizing operations, infrastructure, workforce, and customer service at the National Library of Medicine (NLM). Charged with collecting, organizing, preserving, and disseminating biomedical and life sciences information to the public, the NLM constantly adapts to evolving technologies and scientific advancements in order to better fulfill its mission. Historical context and an overview of operational decision-making offer a window into the workings of our nation's medical library.

Comparative study using inverse ontology cogency and alternatives for concept recognition in the annotated National Library of Medicine database.

This paper introduces inverse ontology cogency, a concept recognition process and distance function that is biologically-inspired and competitive with alternative methods. The paper introduces inverse ontology cogency as a new alternative method. It is a novel distance measure used in selecting the optimum mapping between ontology-specified concepts and phrases in free-form text. We also apply a multi-layer perceptron and text processing method for named entity recognition as an alternative to recurrent neural network methods. Automated named entity recognition, or concept recognition, is a common task in natural language processing. Similarities between confabulation theory and existing language models are discussed. This paper provides comparisons to MetaMap from the National Library of Medicine (NLM), a popular tool used in medicine to map free-form text to concepts in a medical ontology. The NLM provides a manually annotated database from the medical literature with concepts labeled, a unique, valuable source of ground truth, permitting comparison with MetaMap performance. Comparisons for different feature set combinations are made to demonstrate the effectiveness of inverse ontology cogency for entity recognition. Results indicate that using both inverse ontology cogency and corpora cogency improved concept recognition precision 20% over the best published MetaMap results. This demonstrates a new, effective approach for identifying medical concepts in text. This is the first time cogency has been explicitly invoked for reasoning with ontologies, and the first time it has been used on medical literature where high-quality ground truth is available for quality assessment.

The National Library of Medicine's (NLM) Hazardous Substances Data Bank (HSDB): background, recent enhancements and future plans.

The National Library of Medicine's (NLM) Division of Specialized Information Services (SIS) Toxicology and Environmental Health Information Program is responsible for the management of the online Hazardous Substances Data Bank (HSDB). HSDB, a part of NLM's Toxicology Data Network (TOXNET(®)), is a file of chemical/substance information with one record for each specific chemical or substance, or for a category of chemicals or substances. Like the rest of TOXNET's databases and other resources, HSDB is available online at no cost to global users. HSDB has approximately 5600 chemicals and substances, with a focus on toxicology information and also on human exposure, industrial hygiene, emergency handling procedures, environmental fate, regulatory requirements, and related areas of likely interest to HSDB users. All data are from a core set of books, government documents, technical reports, selected primary journal literature, and other online sources of information, with a goal of linking the HSDB content to as much publicly available information as possible. HSDB's content is peer-reviewed by the Scientific Review Panel, a group of experts in the areas covering the scope of HSDB content. Recent enhancements include the addition of chemical structures to HSDB records, the addition of new subfields such as age groups for human data, more occupational exposure standards, and the addition of information on numerous nanomaterials. Examples of future plans include providing more exposure-related information, e.g., uses of a chemical or substance in consumer products; the addition of information summaries aimed towards consumers and other members of the public wanting to learn about a chemical or substance; more visual content such as diagrams (images) of the pathways of metabolism of a substance; and enhanced search features and navigation.

Characteristics of project management at institutions sponsoring National Library of Medicine MedlinePlus Go Local.

OBJECTIVES: Through interviews with the National Library of Medicine's MedlinePlus Go Local collaborators, an evaluation team sought to identify process characteristics that are critical for long-term sustainability of Go Local projects and to describe the impact that Go Local projects have on sponsoring institutions. METHODS: Go Local project coordinators (n = 44) at 31 sponsor institutions participated in semi-structured interviews about their experiences developing and maintaining Go Local sites. Interviews were summarized, checked for accuracy by the participating librarians, and analyzed using a general inductive methodology. RESULTS: Institutional factors that support Go Local projects were identified through the interviews, as well as strategies for staffing and partnerships with external organizations. Positive outcomes for sponsoring institutions also were identified. CONCLUSIONS: The findings may influence the National Library of Medicine team's decisions about improvements to its Go Local system and the support it provides to sponsoring institutions. The findings may benefit current sponsoring institutions as well as those considering or planning a Go Local project.

Library roles in disaster response: an oral history project by the National Library of Medicine.

OBJECTIVES: To develop a knowledgebase of stories illustrating the variety of roles that librarians can assume in emergency and disaster planning, preparedness, response, and recovery, the National Library of Medicine conducted an oral history project during the summer of 2007. The history aimed to describe clearly and compellingly the activities--both expected and unusual--that librarians performed during and in the aftermath of the disasters. While various types of libraries were included in interviews, the overall focus of the project was on elucidating roles for medical libraries. METHODS: Using four broad questions as the basis for telephone and email interviews, the investigators recorded the stories of twenty-three North American librarians who responded to bombings and other acts of terrorism, earthquakes, epidemics, fires, floods, hurricanes, and tornados. RESULTS: Through the process of conducting the oral history, an understanding of multiple roles for libraries in disaster response emerged. The roles fit into eight categories: institutional supporters, collection managers, information disseminators, internal planners, community supporters, government partners, educators and trainers, and information community builders. CONCLUSIONS: Librarians--particularly health sciences librarians--made significant contributions to preparedness and recovery activities surrounding recent disasters. Lessons learned from the oral history project increased understanding of and underscored the value of collaborative relationships between libraries and local, state, and federal disaster management agencies and organizations.

The NIF LinkOut broker: a web resource to facilitate federated data integration using NCBI identifiers.

This paper describes the NIF LinkOut Broker (NLB) that has been built as part of the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) project. The NLB is designed to coordinate the assembly of links to neuroscience information items (e.g., experimental data, knowledge bases, and software tools) that are (1) accessible via the Web, and (2) related to entries in the National Center for Biotechnology Information's (NCBI's) Entrez system. The NLB collects these links from each resource and passes them to the NCBI which incorporates them into its Entrez LinkOut service. In this way, an Entrez user looking at a specific Entrez entry can LinkOut directly to related neuroscience information. The information stored in the NLB can also be utilized in other ways. A second approach, which is operational on a pilot basis, is for the NLB Web server to create dynamically its own Web page of LinkOut links for each NCBI identifier in the NLB database. This approach can allow other resources (in addition to the NCBI Entrez) to LinkOut to related neuroscience information. The paper describes the current NLB system and discusses certain design issues that arose during its implementation.

[Elizabeth Fee: a historian reaching out to wider audiences]. / Elizabeth Fee: uma historiadora em busca de audiências mais amplas.

To what activities and topics does a historian in health and medicine, whose articles and books have become fundamental references for scholars of the area, devote her time? Feminism, counter-culture, medical education, global health, the role of international health organizations, and knowledge sharing in the health history are some of the subjects Elizabeth Fee addresses in this interview given at Fiocruz in April where she presented the 2006 inaugural class to the Graduate Program in History of Health Sciences at Casa de Oswaldo Cruz. The topic of her lecture was "The World Health Organization and AIDS: what can we learn from history?"

The US National Library of Medicine in the 21st century: expanding collections, nontraditional formats, new audiences.

From the early 1960s, the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) has been a leader in applying computer technology to accomplish traditional bibliographic and reference functions. medline, in the early 1970s, was the first large-scale online medical bibliographic reference system. That role has been altered by today's Web environment, which has increased the number and extent of NLM services and the audience for them. The NLM has formally declared that it will seek to serve the general public after over a century of serving the library and medical communities exclusively. In the last several years, many new services have been introduced to fulfil this mandate, including medlineplus and ClinicalTrials.gov. Also a part of the NLM's vision for the 21st century is the need to ensure that the proliferating forms of electronic health information-bibliographic, full text, graphic, audiovisual-are captured and preserved for posterity. A national library such as the NLM has as much an archival responsibility for this electronic information as for centuries-old printed and manuscript historical treasures.

Adjusting to progress: interactions between the National Library of Medicine and health sciences librarians, 1961-2001.

Most health sciences librarians would agree that the National Library of Medicine's (NLM's) leadership and its services have been highly beneficial to the field, but this does not prevent specific NLM actions--or lack of action--from being perceived as annoying or infuriating. Over the past forty years, NLM's interactions with health sciences librarians have been affected by significant additions to NLM's mission and services, the expansion of NLM's direct user groups, and the growing range of possible relationships between health sciences librarians and NLM. The greatest friction between NLM and health services librarians occurs when there is a fundamental change in the way NLM carries out its mission-a change that adds to the web of relationships that link librarians and NLM and prompts corresponding changes in the way other libraries do business. Between 1961 and 2001, there were two such fundamental changes: the implementation of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine and the development and promotion of services targeted toward individual health professionals. On a lesser scale, each new service that connects NLM and health sciences librarians is another potential source of irritation, ready to flare up when the service is interrupted, changed, or eliminated. Other factors--including strong personalities, mistakes, and poor communication--add to, but do not cause, the intermittent problems between NLM and its most longstanding and engaged user group. These problems are in essence the price we pay for the leadership and vision of NLM's directors and for NLM's success in developing excellent services and in enhancing them based on advice from librarians and other users.