Knowledge

The German National Library of Medicine (ZB MED) provides scientists, students and medical professionals with information in the fields of medicine, health, nutrition, the environment and agriculture.

From acupuncture to cytology, nutrition physiology to water protection, soil biology to oenology: with over 1.4 million media in its collection, the German National Library of Medicine offers a huge wealth of knowledge in the areas of medicine, health, nutrition, the environment and agriculture.

Being Germany’s national specialist library, its remit is to acquire as comprehensive a selection of literature from these areas as possible. The library’s two sites, in Cologne and Bonn, divide the broad range of subjects between them: the main library in Cologne is responsible for acquiring, accessing and making available scientific literature on medicine and health, while the district library in Bonn covers nutrition, the environment and agriculture.

Founded in 1969, the National Library of Medicine is jointly funded these days by the country’s federal and state governments. In 2010 it has at its disposal an acquisition budget of 5.3 million euros and is regarded as the largest library in its specialist areas in Europe and the second-largest in the world.

Virtual specialist libraries – MEDPILOT and GREENPILOT

The ZB MED, being also a member of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Scientific Community, is a nationwide infrastructure facility for science and research. A very large number of its projects, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), lead to the continuous further development of the two virtual specialist libraries MEDPILOT (for medicine) and GREENPILOT (for nutrition, environment and agriculture). In 2009, the latter innovative portal was even singled out by Germany’s Federal President as a “Landmark in the Land of Ideas”.

Researching and ordering specialist information could not be easier in both portals. When a search term is entered, a parallel search is conducted in several databases. Both portals also offer semantic research: “The user is provided with the best hits without having to think about synonyms or any sort of linguistic peculiarities”, explains Ulrich Korwitz, who has run the library since 1996. “What is more, the search can be performed in six languages!”

Convenient access to literature – complete texts for download

Today, the ZB MED is Europe’s most popular supplier of information and documents in terms of biomedical literature. Among other things, MEDPILOT offers its users the option of accessing pay-to-view complete texts of the Cochrane Collaboration – a global network of scientists and doctors whose aim is to compile and update systematic overviews for the evaluation of therapies. In addition, complete texts from commercial publishers are made available for direct download upon payment of a fee, while open access complete texts, including the Deutsches Ärzteblatt, are offered for free.

MEDPILOT also features the Current Contents Medicine (or CC MED for short) database funded by the DFG. CC MED is the German counterpart to the renowned US database Medline, which is managed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). German and German-language journals on medicine and health are evaluated for CC MED.

Access to research data – EyeMoviePedia and Virtual Microscopy

The ZB MED has recently also begun to collect research data which it makes available free of charge to scientists worldwide. Researchers and doctors can use the EyeMoviePedia portal, for instance, to watch films showing ophthalmology surgery.

In the “Virtual Microscopy” project, high resolution images of blood smears from the field of haematological oncology are posted on the Internet. “This service saves the doctor from the laborious business of having to consult with experts, and saves patients nerve-wracking time spent waiting for the correct diagnosis and therapy”, explains Korwitz.

Electronic publishing – German Medical Science

The ZB MED additionally supports scientists with the publication of their research findings. The electronic portal “German Medical Science”, developed by the ZB MED in cooperation with the German Institute of Medical Documentation and Information (DIMDI) and the Association of Scientific Medical Societies in Germany (AWMF), allows research findings and conference reports to be published online free of charge.

“In the 14 digital journals published there, advantage is taken of all the possibilities offered by the electronic medium – high resolution images and extensive tables can be integrated just as easily as audio and films”, states Ulrich Korwitz, not without a certain pride. “And as far as the speed and availability of the publications is concerned, they naturally outshine their paper-based rivals by far.”

Incidentally, this is equally true of the specialist library as a whole: the Rhineland giant, with its services for rapid access to information and best possible support of its users, regularly outshines its rivals.