About Us

The Sarasota Memorial Health Care System's Medical Library

Our Mission

The mission of SMHCS Medical Library is to provide all staff unfettered access to evidence-based medical information ensuring that the right information gets to the right team member, at the right time – all in the interest of quality healthcare and patient safety for SMHCS.

History of the Medical Library 

One of the oldest Medical Library Collections recorded in the history of our world was created and maintained by the Assyrians who lived in the Mesopotamian Valley (circa 668-626 B.C.). Under the leadership of the King Assurbanipal of Assyria, several hundred chiseled clay tablets which contained some of the only information on medical treatment and practice known to man at that time, were stored in the new Assurbanipal’s Library where they were shelved in systematic rows of earthen clay jars each labeled according to a medical subject. 

Back then, nobody could have predicted that the medical libraries of today would be one of the first trades to depend on the use of artificial intelligence to identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively search through the medical information that is used to inform practice decisions that lead to quality health and patient safety.

The History of SMHCS’s Medical Library

The history of the SMHCS Medical Library is just as remarkable as those of ancient history except we first began in 1960 when a request was made to the SMH Staff Physicians to please donate their academic medical books from personal libraries to create the first in-house Medical Library for Sarasota Memorial Hospital. This initiative resulted in the donation of approximately 6000 leather-bond multi-volume sets of books ranging from Cardiology to Orthopedics to Nephrology.  We also received over 170 various Medical Association journals – all of which launched Sarasota Memorial Hospital’s first Medical Library.

Today, those rows of earthen clay jars have been replaced with the Medical Library's electronic subscriptions to over 20,000 evidence-based medical journals and roughly 10,000 medical books – all of which are available via the newly created digital library platform making them accessible from anywhere in the world.  Our mission is to provide all staff members unfettered access to evidence-based medical information ensuring that the right information gets to the right team member, at the right time – all in the interest of quality healthcare and patient safety for SMHCS.  

To learn more, please visit the front page of the SMHCS Medical Library!