The AHA has submitted a comment to the Federal Register in response to the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) proposed framework for the NIH-Wide Strategic Plan for FY 2027-2031, which articulates priorities for the institution at large. One of the institutes within NIH, the National Library of Medicine (NLM), is the world’s largest biomedical library, and it maintains and makes available a vast collection and produces electronic information resources on a wide range of topics that are searched billions of times each year by millions of people around the globe. Its collection provides records used by historians, health professionals, and scholars in many fields and disciplines. Recent reorganizations at the NLM, including the elimination of its History of Medicine Division, signal a departure from long-standing commitments to preserving the nation’s biomedical history and raise serious concerns about future access to these critical materials.
The AHA’s comment emphasizes the importance of preserving and expanding access to the nation’s biomedical historical record, and urges the NIH to uphold those principles in their maintenance of the NLM. The full comment is below.
To: Office of the Director, National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Re: Response to NOT-OD-26-047 – Inviting feedback on the Framework for the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-Wide Strategic Plan for Fiscal Years 2027-2031
The American Historical Association (AHA) appreciates this opportunity to provide feedback on the NIH-Wide Strategic Plan for FY 2027–31. Founded in 1884 and incorporated by Congress in 1889 for the promotion of historical studies, the AHA is the largest membership association of historians in the world with more than 10,000 members and 135 affiliate organizations representing a vast portion of the history community. AHA members rely on the NIH’s National Library of Medicine (NLM) as a vital resource for scholarship, education, and the preservation of biomedical history.
The AHA strongly supports both Goal 2 of the NIH’s Strategic Plan Priority 2: Build, Improve, and Sustain Research Resources and Infrastructure, and Goals 1 and 2 of your Strategic Plan Priority 3: Research Operations. The NLM collection is not only an archive of past human experience, but also an essential knowledge infrastructure for 21st-century research. Its collection provides records used by historians, health professionals, and scholars in many fields and disciplines.
However, the AHA remains deeply concerned by recent NLM reorganizations, specifically the elimination of its History of Medicine Division in 2024, which undermined public trust in the library. This shift signaled a departure from the library’s core mandate to maintain, preserve, and make accessible biomedical history and legacies. Current biomedical research can—and should—effectively build on those legacies to sustain and advance scientific discovery. The NIH must ensure that the NLM remains dedicated to its mission and function as a national library authorized by Congress to acquire and preserve information pertinent to biomedicine.
The strategic plan must address the importance of the historical record to realize the NIH’s full potential of drawing on biomedical history, both to understand our past and to sustain and advance current and future scientific discovery. The historical context of public health issues is critical for renewing and building contemporary public confidence in science, and to support the NLM to function as a key node in the ecosystems of data science and global biomedical information. The NIH must ensure that the public domain holdings of the NLM be seamlessly integrated into the 21st-century research ecosystem and preserved for future generations to be able to learn about the human condition in all of its complexity.
The AHA urges the NIH to support the NLM with robust funding and strategic focus toward accelerating NLM’s collection digitization, preserving these materials physically to ensure that the variety of perspectives they reflect will be available for future research, and supporting relevant public programming to raise awareness of the collection’s importance and availability for research. Such investment will ensure that this essential knowledge infrastructure is increasingly usable for researchers today, and safe and available for use by the researchers of tomorrow.
The AHA urges the NIH to incorporate a clear commitment to NLM’s robust collection stewardship and accelerated digitization and preservation of historical materials within the NIH FY 2027–31 Strategic Plan. The NLM’s work, as required by congressional mandate, is not simply about looking back; it is about providing the necessary foundation and investment to make the historical record a part of biomedical research discovery now and in the future.