National Medical Library is a medical library established on April 1, 1966 by the Government of India at Ansari Nagar, New Delhi to provide library and information services to the health science professionals in India.

It functions under the administrative control of the Directorate General of Health Services and has 3.6 lakh volumes of books, reports, bound volume of journals and other literature. It subscribes around 2000 periodicals annually.

It has good collection of 19th century literature. Books are classified according to the Dewey decimal classification. It became the Indian focal point of HELLIS Network under World Health Organization in 1982.

It has been organizing training programmes for medical/health science librarians since 1980 and has organized 17 Orientation Courses in Health Science Librarianship and trained over 150 librarians in India.

It has also conducted training courses on specific topics like MEDLARS Searching, Computer Applications, Library management Software, Indexing and Abstracting etc. in different regions. National Workshop was held in 1997 to evaluate these courses.

Any qualified medical person, student or faculty can take membership of the library and utilize the services of it. One can also obtain a photocopy of any articles by post by paying nominal fee.

It has set up a network of health science libraries in India. It has with the support from WHO, Identified followed 6 Regional (RML) and 8 Resource Medical Libraries (RL) in India:

REGIONAL MEDICAL LIBRARIES (6)
1. SMS Medical Collage, Jaipur (North)
2. Grant Medical College, Mumbai (West)
3. Institute of Medical Science, BHU, Varanasi (Central)
4. T.N. Dr MGR Medical University, Chennai (South)
5. All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health, Calcutta (East)
6. Regional Medical Institute, Imphal (Northeast)

RESOURCE LIBRARIES (8)
1. B J Medical Collage, Ahemdabad
2. M G Institute of Medical Science, Wardha
3. Govt. Medical Collage, Nagpur
4. K G Medical Collage, Lucknow
5. Govt. Medical Collage, Guwahati
6. Gandhi Medical Collage, Bhopal
7. S C B Medical Collage, Cuttack
8. Central Research Institute, Kasauli

These libraries have been supplied with equipment like microcomputer, CD-ROM Drive and MEDLINE database to all RMLs and a photocopier to all RLs. A grant-in-aid @ Rs 1.20 lakh each to RML and 0.75 lakh each to RL were also released to strengthen their document collection.

Contact Detail:
National Medical Library
Ansari Nagar Ring Road,
New Delhi, Delhi 110029
Phone:011 2658 9085