The Medical Heritage Library adds National Institutes of Health Annual Reports from the NIH Library

The Medical Heritage Library is proud to announce the inclusion of over 800 digitized reports from the National Institutes of Health Library, which is located on the NIH Campus in Bethesda, Maryland.

The NIH Library plays a key role in the mission of the National Institutes of Health – “science in the pursuit of fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge to extend healthy life and reduce the burdens of illness and disability.” The NIH Library’s large collection of online and print resources supports and advances the discovery efforts of NIH researchers and programs.

National Cancer Institute, Measurements of Ultraviolet Radiation in the United States and Comparisons with Skin Cancer Data, Bethesda, Maryland, 1975.

The NIH Library has scanned an important collection of over 800 annual reports and other program materials issued by NIH Institutes and Centers dating from the 1950s to the 1990s. Each annual report consists of a list of investigators, project summaries, and individual project reports that describe objectives, methods, and major findings.  Annual reports created since the mid-to-late 1990’s have already been searchable by the public online, however, these older reports remained limited to in-library usage. Digitizing this material provides a historical perspective on the activities and accomplishments of the Institutes and individual researchers.

In order to carry out the project, the NIH Library initiated a partnership in 2009 with FedScan, a digitization effort operated by Internet Archive and hosted by the Library of Congress.  All volumes were made available to the public at that time through the Internet Archive web site as well as linked through the NIH Library catalog.

Now these materials are also available in the Medical Heritage Library collection in Internet Archive, alongside 43,000 other titles from contributing libraries.  Included in the NIH Library materials are important works such as the Report of Program Activities for the National Cancer Institute from 1954 and the program and paper abstracts for the Third International Conference on AIDS in 1987, which was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the World Health Organization. The addition of these materials adds further depth to

William Blake, “The figure of Urizen or the Ancient of Days,” used as frontispiece to: National Institute on Drug Abuse, Drugs and Death: The Non-Medical Use of Drugs Related to all Modes of Death, Rockville, Maryland, 1974.

MHL’s holdings, making us better able to support historical research into 20^th-century topics.

As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!