ZB MED - Information Centre for Life Sciences, Research and information center for life sciences in Cologne, Germany.
ZB MED is an information center for life sciences with two locations across Germany. The Cologne facility focuses on medicine and health sciences, while the Bonn location supports agricultural research and documentation.
The center was founded in 1973 through the merger of several specialist libraries, building on a medical collection from 1908 at the Academy of Practical Medicine. This merger brought together important holdings from multiple institutions to create a unified research resource.
ZB MED's name dates from 2014, when the library became a foundation called ZB MED – Leibniz Information Centre for Life Sciences; before that it was the German Central Library for Medicine. Its catalogue data has been released under a CC0 licence since December 2010, and the search portal LIVIVO replaced Medpilot and Greenpilot in April 2015.
Reading rooms in Cologne are open on weekdays and provide access to over 30,000 electronic publications and specialized collections. Visitors can work with materials covering medicine, health sciences, and related research topics.
The library holds about 30 kilometres of shelving and, as of 2021, a virtual stock of some 71.5 million items, with journals acquired in all languages. It specialises in "gray literature" that is hard to obtain through normal book or journal trade. Since December 2010 all catalogue data has been released under the CC0 licence.
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