Visiting (and using!) the National Library of Medicine

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) is open to the public for research. Your federal tax dollars pay for the institution, so consider it your civic right to take advantage of their resources!

Located amidst the National Institutes of Health “campus” in Bethesda, MD, getting to the NLM requires planning, but it isn’t especially tricky. If you plan to park on campus, you’ll have to go through a mild security check at the gate. Address is 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20894. But the NLM is also metro accessible: get off at Medical Center on the Red Line, and follow the instructions here for walking or taking a bus to the gates.

At the NLM, you can gain access to one of the most extensive and diverse collections of books, journals and electronic resources on medicine and health in the world! Doing research for your nursing or psychology classes? You’ll want to exploit the knowledge and expertise of the reference staff at the NLM. More about reference services can be found here. You can even e-mail your research questions from home!

The “stacks” at the NLM are only accessible to staff, and you can request to have materials retrieved for you. However, you might find that the 4,500 textbooks, indexes and audiovisuals – or the five recent years of approximately 150 medical journals – or the computer terminals with access to a variety of medical and health databases available in the Main Reading Room for browsing will suit your research fine! Go on, and check out what the NLM has to offer.