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), on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, is the world's largest medical library. The Library collects materials in all areas of biomedicine and health care, as well as works on biomedical aspects of technology, the humanities, and the physical, life, and social sciences. The collections stand at 5.8 million items--books, journals, technical reports, manuscripts, microfilms, photographs and images. Housed within the Library is one of the world's finest medical history collections of old and rare medical works. The Library's collection may be consulted in the reading room or requested on interlibrary loan. NLM is a national resource for all U.S. health science libraries through a National Network of Libraries of Medicine.

For more than 100 years, the Library has published the Index Medicus, a monthly subject/author guide to articles in 3400 journals. This information, and much more, is available today through the on-line database, MEDLINE. MEDLINE has more than 13 million journal article references and abstracts going back to the early sixties. Other databases provide information on monographs (books), audiovisual materials, and on such specialized subjects as toxicology, environmental health, and molecular biology. More than two million searches of MEDLINE are performed each day by health professionals, scientists, librarians, and the public. Many article references link to the full text of the work cited, and a service called PubMedCentral provides free access to a central repository of journal articles. The NLM has created a special site, MEDLINEplus, to link the general public to many sources of consumer health information.