2012 Cornerstone Award Recipient

Dr. Donald A. Lindberg

The Cornerstone Award is given to an individual, group, or institution selected by the association's Board of Directors. The award is given for a notable or important contribution made during the most recent four years that has assisted AAHSL in achieving its mission or had significant impact on the profession of academic health sciences librarianship.

Dr. Donald A. Lindberg has been a strong supporter of academic health sciences and medical libraries for many years.  As director of the National Library of Medicine for past 38 years, he has ensured that health professionals have access to the latest literature through their health sciences libraries, cutting edge online systems, and the strong National Network of Libraries of Medicine located in eight (8) regions across the country.  He has made it possible for health sciences libraries to explore the changing times by bringing together thought leaders about the library as place, information specialists in content, and the role of informatics in information delivery, to name just a few.

In addition to supporting access to high quality information, Dr. Lindberg has been a champion of developing leaders in health sciences librarianship.  As director, he has supported the joint NLM and AAHSL leadership fellows program.  This program is entering its 10th year and has become crucial to the future of our health sciences libraries.  The leadership program has provided 50 fellows with the opportunity to learn more about leading health sciences libraries within the dynamic health care and digital environments.  Forty-two AAHSL members have served as mentors with over 52% of our full members (71 institutions) providing fellows or mentors.  The program has been incredibly successful with 19 (42%) of the graduates being appointed directors for a total of 28 (62%) who have become directors or have been promoted to positions of higher administrative responsibility.  

In addition to his on-going commitment of NLM funding for this joint program, Dr. Lindberg has taken a personal interest in the success of the program.  He always takes the time from his very busy schedule to spend time with each cohort of fellows and mentors during the Capstone Course and at graduation and other events.  He shares his knowledge, expertise, and perspectives on libraries and informatics and their importance to clinical medicine and biomedical research.  

Dr. Lindberg has also championed the value of libraries, bringing together institutional leaders to discuss major issues while underscoring the importance of libraries in supporting institutional missions.  Just as one example, in 2011 NLM supported a joint research summit with AAMC and AAHSL that brought together librarians, IT professionals, and researchers to discuss the challenges of digital research enterprise.

Under his leadership, PubMed and many other databases and resources have evolved and become critical tools for academic health centers globally as well as locally. MedlinePlus has also grown and emerged as a premier tool to support consumer health efforts and needs, and can now be integrated into the electronic health record furthering libraries’ efforts in bringing information to the point of care.  Through PubMed Central and his work on the NIH Public Access Policy, Dr. Lindberg has also had a major impact on scholarly communication and how quickly bio-medical research results are shared with the world.  

His vision and commitment as a leader to the value of libraries in bio-medicine have helped AAHSL members provide outstanding services to their communities, while facing the ever changing challenges of bio-medicine and the digital world.

Accepting the 2012 Cornerstone Award from AAHSL President Gary Freiburger on behalf of Dr. Donald A. Lindberg is Joyce Backus, Deputy Associate Director for Library Operations, National Library of Medicine.