Scientists Explore the Origin of Outbreaks Online
When scientists need access to information on medical topics such as human genetics and flu outbreaks, they turn to the National Library of Medicine (NLM).
As part of the world’s largest repository of healthcare information, the NLM is home to vast resources, including the principal DNA sequence database, a key resource in researching the genetic factors underlying human diseases.
Founded in 1836 and located on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., NLM plays a critical role in enabling biomedical research. Elements of the library’s collection of more than 18 million books, journals, manuscripts and audiovisuals have been digitized and made available online.
NLM’s resources are searched more than one billion times each year by users around the globe. Using a combination of local knowledge and technical expertise, CSC teams with NLM staff and other contractors to support the shared communications and security infrastructure that helps NLM make these biomedical resources available to the public and research community.
24x7 availability is imperative
Such an essential collection of resources needs to be reliable and secure. Since 2001, CSC has provided IT infrastructure services that help the library run efficiently. Over the years, CSC’s work has included support for desktop and server computing, communications networking, application development and IT security, as well as support for green initiatives and data center reengineering.
Wes Russell, the NLM’s head of network engineering, says CSC delivers services in a reliable, efficient and effective manner. “It’s all about the technical staff and their expertise, their knowledge, skills and dedication in being able to support our multiple and diverse systems,” Russell says.
NLM requires that services are run 24x7 to continuously support the global medical community, and, Russell says, “The staff is dedicated to doing that. They’re willing to work off-hours and deal with issues, as well as work with other teammates to resolve those problems to keep our services up and running.”
Russell points to cybersecurity as a good example of how CSC is able to meet a significant technical challenge. CSC helped reengineer NLM’s internal network, which included the design and implementation of a number of security zones separated by firewalls to protect various sets of private resources that have restricted access.
“CSC staff was integral in implementing those systems and monitoring our security, as well as responding to any kind of incidents we might have, which are rare, but they do happen. So it’s very important for us,” Russell says.
Tom Gigl, CSC’s program manager for NLM, says that CSC’s local knowledge and a strong partnership with CSC strategic teammate AAC Inc. are also indispensable. “We’ve been fortunate to have the bulk of our team providing the same services for five-plus years. The people on the ground have a lot of experience as well as local knowledge of NLM.”
Medical resources go digital
CSC’s local knowledge came in handy when the NLM undertook an ambitious digitization project in 2006. A massive digital preservation repository, known as Digital Collections, gives online visitors access to a wide range of historical medicalrelated materials, all of which are in the public domain.
Wei Ma, NLM’s applications branch chief, who led the digitization efforts, says, “The content people are like librarians. They know the content very well and know how to prioritize which historical books and videos should be digitized first.”
Now, hundreds of rare documents, videos and photographs can be accessed free of charge. Ma says the resources are especially useful to epidemiologists studying the origins and outbreaks of diseases, such as the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, which infected some 500 million people.
In planning the digital repository, the CSC and NLM team worked together to evaluate and then recommend a leading open source software solution. The open source suite has Fedora Commons, a digital asset management architecture, at its core, combined with open source image server and book viewer software. The repository is more than just a Web application or database. Using semantic Web technology, it stores manifestations of content that describes and interrelates the materials using descriptive metadata.
A user looking for specific content in a video, for example, can pinpoint just the part that is related to a search and not have to view the entire video. “Without the strong contribution of the technical development team, the Digital Collection project wouldn’t have been successful. CSC staff, as part of the technical development team, did a great job supporting the Digital Collections project,” Ma says.
Russell adds, “CSC is involved in technical support of the communications and security infrastructure that enables making the library’s systems available to researchers and the public. If it wasn’t for these reliable IT services, NLM’s mission of enabling biomedical research, supporting healthcare and public health, and promoting healthy behavior could not be fulfilled.”
Jim Battey is a writer for CSC’s digital marketing team.
