Courses, Lectures, and Symposia
The weekly routine at the NIH always includes a healthy dose of formal seminars under the direction of NIH staff; including clinical staff conferences, formal lectures, symposia, and an annual scientific research festival in the fall. The NIH Calendar of Events lists an average of 25 to 30 seminars and scientific meetings each week. Other events of interest are available to students in the Greater Washington-Baltimore area, widely known for its educational and cultural opportunities. Weekends often provide opportunities for clinical electives students to explore the region.
Library Facilities
The NIH Library, located in the Clinical Center, provides a central facility for the scientific, medical, administrative, and support staff engaged in NIH research programs. As a self-service, open stack library, it contains an extensive collection of U.S. and foreign journals. In addition to the usual services, the library provides on-line access to the National Library of Medicine's medical literature data banks, advisory services for literature needs, and a translating service.
The National Library of Medicine (NLM), in Bethesda, Maryland, is a part of the National Institutes of Health, US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Since its founding in 1836, NLM has played a pivotal role in translating biomedical research into practice. It is the world's largest biomedical library and the developer of electronic information services that deliver trillions of bytes of data to millions of users every day. Scientists, health professionals, and the public in the US and around the globe search the Library's online information resources more than one billion times each year. The Library is open to all and has many services and resources--for scientists, health professionals, historians, and the general public. NLM has nearly 19 million books, journals, manuscripts, audiovisuals, and other forms of medical information on its shelves, making it the largest health-science library in the world.
Scientific Information Services: The most frequently consulted online scientific medical resource in the world is MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a publicly available database of over 22 million journal citations from 1946 to the present. Another important part of NLM's vast online holdings is PubMed Central® (PMC), a Web-based repository of biomedical journal literature providing free, unrestricted access to more than 2.5 million full-text articles.
Information Services for the Public: The Library has extensive information resources to serve the general public. The Library's main portal for consumer health information is MedlinePlus®, available in both English and Spanish (MedlinePlus en español). MedlinePlus has comprehensive, up-to-date, easy-to-read information on nearly 900 health topics. It also provides interactive health tutorials and a collection of surgery videos. MedlinePlus features information on thousands of prescription and over-the-counter medicines, as well as alternative treatments such as herbals. And, to provide the public with more health care news it can use, NLM staff oversees the production of the free, quarterly NIH MedlinePlus magazine and its Spanish-language counterpart, NIH MedlinePlus Salud.