The Miles Conrad Lecture
T
he Miles Conrad lecture has been a highlight of NISO conferences, and NFAIS meetings. It was established to honor the memory of G. Miles Conrad who was director of Biological Abstracts, (now BIOSIS Previews). In 1957 he organized a meeting of 14 abstracting and i n d ex i n g p r ov i d e r s to discuss the effects of government investments in science following the launch of Sputnik, and this meeting led to the formation of NFAIS in 1958. The Miles Conrad Lecture began in 1964 fo l l ow i n g Co n r a d ’s death. This year’s Miles Co n r a d Aw a r d w a s presented to Dr. Patricia Flatley Brennan, Director of the National Library of Medicine (NLM). Dr. Brennan received her Bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of Delaware, and her Master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania. She then entered clinical practice, studied the connections between nursing and information systems, and received her Ph.D. degree in industrial engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2016, she became the first woman, first nurse, and first industrial engineer to become Director of NLM.
Dr. Brennan’s Miles Dr. Patricia Flatley Brennan Conrad lecture was entitled “The Role of a Library in a World of Unstructured Data”: Libraries will persist, but the digital objects that must be connected will constantly change, so we will have jobs for a long time. NLM cannot operate alone. We must partner with publishers, authors, distributors, technology companies and our stakeholders. Connecting people with information is a critical and important role in our society, and standards are an important part of that because they bring order to complex information.
The Mission and History of NLM NLM focuses not only on acquiring, collecting, preserving, and disseminating scientific communications, but also on the tools to ensure that it is available. Here are some of the major highlights in its history:
44 Against the Grain / April 2022
Serving Science and Society Since 1836
NLM’s collection began on a shelf in a field surgeon’s tent and is now located on the campus of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. AB Lindberg, Dr. Brennan’s predecessor and also a Miles Conrad Lecturer brought a strong focus on innovation into NLM, which developed into the 21st Century library of today.
NLM Today NLM is the world’s largest medical library. It has 8,000 points of presence in the country and answers a million inquiries a day which gives it access to communities. PubMed has 23 million citations. Here is a photo of the NIH campus.
Obviously, COVID has changed the nature of research at NIH. Quick planning of research quickly requires a balance between science and society. NLM has learned much from the COVID pandemic: • Medical information must be complemented by an understanding of the person. • Community norms and privileges intersect with research principles and federal requirements. • Research at the speed of a pandemic goes best when it leverages existing community investments and established research assets, including standards. • We must improve the reproducibility and rigor of research to accurately characterize the experiences of all people in the pandemic and promote a better understanding of the clinical experience by leveraging information. Terminology and messaging standards play an important role. NLM has spearheaded new forms of scientific communication: preprint pilots, a public health emergency COVID initiative in which more than 50 publishers participated, making PubMed articles available without charge, and a global health events web archive which contains over 12,000 items of born-digital resources.
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