Anticipating a Future We Never Anticipated

During the summer of 2017, my first summer as Director of the National Library of Medicine, Joyce Backus—our then-NLM Associate Director for Library Operations (ADLO)—approached me with a wild idea: “How about we engage an architectural firm to guide renovations of our library space?” Joyce was a forward-thinking ADLO and had already done much to spearhead important renovations to protect our collections and make them accessible to the public.

As you may know, NLM has 66 miles of shelving that house our expansive collections: from books to journals, audiovisual recordings to unique papers of medical and public health pioneers, to rare and unique manuscripts and volumes spanning ten centuries and originating from nearly every part of the world. From 2014 to 2019, NLM worked with the Wellcome Trust to digitize and make freely available via PubMed Central, or PMC, thousands of complete back issues of historically significant biomedical journals along with their human- and computer-readable citations; the availability of this important biomedical literature began the joint investment to advance research, education, and learning.

Fast forward to 2022 when we entered the third year of a global pandemic. Libraries around the world served as essential resources not just by providing up-to-the-minute, trustable access to COVID-19 information, but also by providing innovative and accessible free spaces to work, study, and gather safely. Many businesses and services had to turn on a dime to figure out how to protect their assets and deliver their operations remotely, but NLM was prepared for the challenge and already familiar with strategies that preserve our past and make our holdings available to people who may never set foot in our building.

Now—I would like to claim clairvoyance as an essential skill of the NLM workforce, but of course that would be foolhardy! No one can see into the future, including NLM staff. Almost 200 years of serving the public has engendered in our workforce an ability to serve increasingly diverse stakeholders in the present while keeping an eye to their future needs and anticipating ways to meet them. Libraries are essentially a human enterprise and designing spaces to make the best use of our excellent workforce is critical for our future.

So, it’s not too surprising that as the COVID-19 pandemic overtook the world, NLM in particular and libraries in general stepped up to the task! NLM expanded its terminologies to include new ones representing the emerging vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostic tools; expanded the resources in our Network of the National Library of Medicine to support outreach and locally congruent information resources about the pandemic; and improved access to digitized versions of our holdings in an on-demand fashion. We planned new workspace arrangements to make the best use of our existing buildings to anticipate their suitability for hoteling, hybrid work engagements, and on-site meetings to bring teams together.

I am inspired by how we anticipated a future we never anticipated, and I spent the year reflecting with my leadership team to discern how this success will provide us with the guidance to anticipate the next future we never anticipated. Please join us in this process to make sure that we have the space and access to reliable biomedical information for your needs!

Patricia Flatley Brennan, RN, PhD

Director, National Library of Medicine

Dr. Brennan is the Director of the NIH National Library of Medicine, a leader in biomedical informatics and computational health data science research and the world’s largest biomedical library. Under her leadership, NLM has grown its intramural and extramural research enterprise, extended stakeholders’ access to credible and reliable health information, and acquired and preserved biomedical literature using cutting-edge digital research and outreach. Read more about Dr. Brennan.