July 17, 2004
Medline Plus
Medline Plus is an online health database maintained by the National Library of Medicine.
The seeds of Medline Plus were planted with the creation of MEDLARS (the Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System) in 1964. Medline began serving medical professionals and libraries with online access to a subset of the MEDLARS database starting in 1971.
Medline Plus was launched in 1998 as a pilot project to give internet users free access to consumer health information.
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) was established in 1836 as the Library of the Office of the Surgeon General of the Army. By the end of the nineteenth century it was recognized as a national resource of biomedical literature. In 1968 the NLM was brought under the umbrella of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), of which the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) is also a part.
The NLM is now the world’s largest medical library, collecting “information and research services in all areas of biomedicine and health care.”
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