Announcements
Highlights from the NLM Update at MLA
Dr. Don Lindberg spoke at the recently held Medical Library Association meeting in Dallas. During his talk, he described five areas of focus for NLM during the coming year. The first area was development of consumer health information. MedlinePlus will provide better drug information, there will be more attention given to providing information that people with poor vision will be able to see and a Spanish language version will be available "pronto", probably near the end of 2002. Clinical Trials.gov will be adding industry sponsored trials in the near future. There will be greater efforts to involve and educate our colleagues in public libraries about the free products and services available to them.
The second area discussed was Grants and Awards. An RFP for the creation of a new central protein database of protein sequence and functions will be announced soon. In addition, awards have been made to some institutions for the BISTI project - Biomedical Information and Technology Initiative. Columbia University's center for Computational Biology and Informatics has received $700 million and Yale University's Biomedical Computer Center of Excellence has received $400 million from NLM. IAIMS Grants are now funded in five levels - Planning, Operations, Pilot Study, Testing and Evaluation and IAIMS Fellowships. Dr. Lindberg also announced that NLM will participate in the next generation Internet with and application of advanced network infrastructure technology in health and disaster management project.
The third item that Dr. Lindberg discussed was the new NLM building project. He reported that 1100 people work in a space designed for 600 and that there will be no space for library collections after 2004. He outlined ADA compliance needs and new security demands. As many of us are finding in our own libraries, there is now remote storage (in four locations) and there is a need for space for small group meetings. The plans for the new building are underway. Dr. Lindberg announced that the new Chairman of the Board of Regents is Allison Bunting of UCLA .
The final area of focus that Dr. Lindberg mentioned was the issues that surround terrorism and disasters. He stated that NLM is not an intelligence agency but that both NIH and NLM are becoming more security conscious. There are plans being made for disaster management. NLM supports research for information systems to detect epidemics, for use in emergencies and to support early warning systems.
Slides from Dr. Lindbergs Talk
Highlights submitted by Deborah Sibley, Associate Director
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