The Texas Medical Center Library

The Texas Medical Center (TMC) Library is a health sciences library located in the Texas Medical Center (TMC) in Houston, TX. The TMC Library is the only major medical and scientific library serving the entire 1,345 sq. acre Texas Medical Center (TMC) campus and its non-profit institutions. It offers librarian services and expertise, and provides biomedical information for education and research activities to take place, and study space for students for these schools to help maintain their accreditation.

Additionally, for the past twenty-five years, the TMC Library has been the home site for the National Network of Libraries of Medicine – South Central Region (NN/LM SCR). Through a competitive bid process, the TMC Library has secured the contract from the National Library of Medicine, under the National Institutes of Health. The NN/LM SCR is dedicated to serving the health information needs of librarians, health care practitioners, administrators, investigators, educators and consumers within our five state region of New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas.

The TMC Library was founded in 1915 to serve the physicians of the Harris County Medical Society (HCMS) and has expanded significantly over the last 100 years. When Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) arrived in 1946, the school and the Harris County Medical Society decided to combine their collections into a single library to better serve the physicians of Harris County and the educational and research programs of BCM. This newly formed library would be under the jurisdiction of the Houston Academy of Medicine (HAM), a 501(c)3 entity created in the 1940s by HCMS that identified the Library as an independent tax-exempt organization. In 1949, HAM with nearly 18,000 volumes and BCM with almost 16,000 volumes in its collection, formalized their agreement to create a central, shared library under the jurisdiction of HAM which would serve all of the TMC. Later, The University of Texas Health Science Center and Texas Woman's University joined and a consortia was born.

The permanent building for this new library came shortly after in the early 1950s, through the efforts of a group of forward thinkers from HCMS and BCM, interested in the growth of the TMC and in a strong library to support medical education. These individuals secured funds from major Foundations and other leading community philanthropists to build a separate facility to house the Library. Jesse H. Jones made a personal gift for the construction of the building and in 1954, the Jesse H. Jones Library Building was dedicated with approximately 27,000 square feet of space over three floors. The building bears Mr. Jones' name and is the only building to do so in the TMC. The cornerstone of the 1954 building reads: “Jesse H. Jones Library Building of the Houston Academy of Medicine for the Texas Medical Center.”

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