Donald Lindberg
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Donald A. B. Lindberg (1933-2019) was Director of the US National Library of Medicine.
Life
Donald Allen Bror Lindberg was born on September 21, 1933 and grew up in Brooklyn, NY. He graduated from Amherst College in 1954 and received his MD from Columbia University in 1958. Between 1958 and 1960, he completed an internship and residency in pathology at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center.
In 1960 he joined faculty of the University of Missouri School of Medicine where he developed health care applications of computer technology and informatics for medicine. From 1984 until his retirement in 2015 he was Director of the National Library of Medicine where he remained until he retired in 2015.
From 1992-1995, he served in a concurrent position as founding Director of the White House High Performance Computing and Communications Program. In 1996, he was named by the Health and Human Services Secretary to be the U.S. Coordinator for the G-7 Global Healthcare Applications Project.
He died on August 17, 2019.
Contributions
He was known for his work in medical computing and was Director of the National Library of Medicine from 1984 until his retirement in 2015.
There were many important developments at the National Library of Medicine under his direction, including:
- PubMed: An openly-accessible free database which includes primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health maintains the database as part of the Entrez system of information retrieval. From 1971 to 1997, online access to the MEDLINE database was provided via computer and phone lines primarily through institutional facilities, such as university libraries. PubMed, first released in January 1996, ushered in the era of private, free, home- and office-based MEDLINE searching. The PubMed system was offered free to the public starting in June 1997. [1]
- ClinicalTrials.gov. A website and online database of clinical research studies and information about their results. [2]
Linberg was the founding President of the American Medical Informatics Association. He was also founding director of the National Coordination Office for High Performance Computing and Communications in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President, 1992 to 1995.
Publications
- The computer and medical care. Springfield, IL: C.C. Thomas, 1968.
- The growth of medical information systems in the United States. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1979.
- "The unified medical language system." With Betsy L. Humphreys & Alexa T. McCray. Yearbook of medical informatics 2, no. 01 (1993): 41-51.
- "The unified medical language system: an informatics research collaboration." With others. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 5, no. 1 (1998): 1-11.
- "2015—the future of medical libraries." With Betsy L. Humphreys. New England Journal of Medicine 352, no. 11 (2005): 1067-1070.
- "Issues in the registration of clinical trials." With others. Jama 297, no. 19 (2007): 2112-2120.
Awards
American College of Medical Informatics. Morris F. Collen Award, 1997.
Further reading
- "Donald A. B. Lindberg (1933–2019): Visionary medical informaticist who laid the groundwork for PubMed." Science 366, No. 6461 (4 Oct 2019): 37ff. [3]
- Miller, Randolph A., and Edward H. Shortliffe. "The roles of the US National Library of Medicine and Donald AB Lindberg in revolutionizing biomedical and health informatics." Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 28, no. 12 (2021): 2728-2737.
- "Donald A. B. Lindberg." Wikipedia [4]
- Gottlieb, Katherine, Cynthia Lindquist, Theodore A. Mala, and Marjorie K. Leimomi M. Mau. "Reflections on Dr. Donald AB Lindberg and Native Voices." Information Services and Use 41, no. 3-4 (2021): 315-323.
Papers
National Library of Medicine. History of Medicine Division. Archives and Modern Manuscripts Collection. Donald A.B. Lindberg Papers. 1954-2017. MS C 627.