Library and Information Science

The U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM)'s MEDLARS system began its operation in 1963, and is now as the stage of developing its world wide network of the decentralized, “satellite” centers.

Some of them, such as the medical libraries of UCLA and University of Colorado reported their experience in opening up the centers. The formers' reports were mostly on the problems they encountered in reprograming the MEDLARS for the IBM 7094 computer by using COBOL. The latter analyzed the costs of operating its center and providing the demand literature search service.

The recurring bibliographies in the fields of rheumatology, fibrinolysis, cardiovascular diseases, dentistry, nursing, etc., are the products of another type of cooperation between MEDLARS and the groups of specialists in the United States. As for the oversea satellite centers, there are two at the moment, one in England and the other in Sweden.

In Japan, the medical school library of Keio University started the work of indexing Japanese medical periodical articles for MEDLARS in 1966. The library is also acting as an agent of the NLM in acquiring Japanese medical books and periodicals.

It is desired to have a satellite center in Japan. The most suitable place to locate the center may be the Japan Information Center of Science and Technology (JICST). But to ask the NLM to provide our center the MEDLARS' magnetic tapes and the programs to run them, all of the organizations who are concerned with medical information works have to get together and make our request to the NLM as national request.

It is not an easy task but it must be done lest we should not be left behind of the development in this world-wide machine literature search system in medicine.