One of the great joys of being the Director of the National Library of Medicine is the many opportunities for me to express gratitude. In the past, I have given thanks to NLM staff who are veterans (2021), for progress during my tenure (2020), and to our amazing NLM staff members (2019). This year, I am pausing to give thanks for the outstanding products and services developed and stewarded by our NLM staff, made available every day of the year to anyone with an internet connection—and even to some without!

First, I am thankful for our information collections in their many forms. The NLM Board of Regents oversees our Collection and Preservation Policy, which guides NLM as it meets its mission to acquire, organize, preserve, and disseminate biomedical knowledge from around the world. Our collection spans ten centuries from the 11th to the 21st, and ranges from the third oldest Arabic medical manuscript in existence to the “Rosetta Stone” of modern science, Marshall Nirenberg’s genetic chart, from genomic sequences essential for current and future research to information for mothers taking care of sick children.

Organizing the collections and making them findable and accessible builds on the knowledge of library and information science. This foundational knowledge means we can tag objects—real or virtual—with codes and terms that help with organization and retrieval. It also means we use our knowledge of library and information science to guide efforts to annotate and curate molecular data, literature citations, and images so they are accessible to the public. So I am grateful not only for the 66 miles of shelving that hold our precious objects, books, and journals here in Bethesda, but for the ever-powerful computer clouds that preserve our high-value research databases and 34 million bibliographic citations in PubMed. Libraries do more than house books; they use sophisticated knowledge to organize materials and make them readily available.

I am thankful for the ways that staff at NLM’s National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) manages the submission, curation, and dissemination of our enormous genomic and molecular databases. From ClinVar (our collection of genomic sequences linked to clinical annotation) to the Sequence Read Archive (the world’s largest scientific data repository), our staff makes sure that depositors can effectively deposit data, scientific curators can conduct quality checks, and web and interface designers allow access to the data. A few years ago, the NCBI team led a cloud migration process to make available data from the entire 15-petabyte SRA resource on two commercial cloud providers. This bold step democratized sequence-based scientific inquiry and harnessed the computational power of cloud platforms, which contributed to industrial innovations and shortened the pathway for scientific discovery from days and months to minutes and hours. I am thankful for the role NLM plays in accelerating scientific advances and leveraging research resources for public health benefit.

NLM offers more than 1,000 easy-to-read health topic articles through our online consumer health information resource known as MedlinePlus. MedlinePlus is available in both English and Spanish, thereby assuring information access to speakers of two of the world’s most common languages. Through MedlinePlus Connect, our technical team also provides direct, tailored access to MedlinePlus resources automatically through electronic health records, patient portals, and other health information technology systems to deliver information from MedlinePlus to patients and providers at the point of care. I am thankful for the efforts of the MedlinePlus teams that bring timely and trusted information to the lives of everyone, everywhere.

I hinted earlier that there are two main pathways to access NLM products and services. Electronic access, supporting both human- and machine-readable forms, is by far the most common pathway to NLM. We also support the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) and its more than 8,000 members around the country in public, hospital, and academic medical center libraries to bring the power of NLM and its resources to the public. I am grateful for everyone who works as part of NNLM for their ability to bring NLM’s products and services to communities everywhere as well as how the needs and practices of those communities bring awareness of NLM.

As you pause this year in thanksgiving for the many public services that support you in everyday life, please remember to give thanks for NLM’s products and services. We think they are world class, and we are grateful for our ability to serve you.