Mission
To advance biomedical discovery, education, and health care by providing leadership in the research, management, and sharing of knowledge.
Welch Services
Welch Medical Library serves the information needs of the faculty, staff, and students of Johns Hopkins Medicine, Nursing and Public Health.
The Welch Service Center provides in-person circulation and document retrieval, reference and searching assistance, and reserves services.
Informationists offer a variety of professional tailored services, including individual and group consultations; searching-from general reference and evidence-based precision to full-scale systematic review participation; citation management; curriculum, classroom, and online instruction; and collaborations on grants and research projects from beginning to end, as they evolve. Informationists are experts at navigating the publishing landscape to respond to complex requests related to research impact, scholarly output, and research dissemination.
View Services for more information about how Welch serves you.
Welch Collection
The library collects current scholarly information that supports the research, clinical, administrative, and educational needs of the Johns Hopkins Medicine, Nursing and Public Health. Because the library’s emphasis is on providing materials at point of need, the collection is primarily in digital format. It covers health, the practice of medicine and related biomedical and allied health care disciplines, public health and related disciplines, nursing, research literature, methodological literature, reviews or state-of-the-art reports, and in-depth, authoritative analyses of areas influencing biomedicine and health care. The Welch online collection includes approximately 20,000 journals and 1,200 databases.
Johns Hopkins Medicine, Nursing, and Public Health scholars have access to both the print and online collections of the collective Johns Hopkins libraries including over 150,000 journals and just under a million e-books.
Welch Medical Library Building
The William H. Welch Medical Library, located at 1900 East Monument Street, was founded in 1929 with the merger of three libraries: the School of Medicine, the School of Hygiene and Public Health, and Johns Hopkins Hospital. From its inception, the library has been used by the faculty, students, and staff of the Schools of Medicine, Public Health, and Nursing as well as by the staff and attending physicians of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. In 2012, most library staff relocated to offices in the 2024 East Monument building and in the JHU Mt. Washington campus. Today, the historic Welch Medical Library building (WMLB) continues to house the print collections of the Welch Medical Library and the Welch Service Center, the staffed, onsite service point for users of the print collection and other document services. In addition, the WMLB has always been the home for the offices and collections of the Institute of the History of Medicine and, more recently, the Academy@Johns Hopkins. Study space is available on the second floor of the library in the East and West Reading rooms, and in the central lobby. Events can be held in the Library’s East and West Reading Rooms.
Funding Model
The primary funding for the library is supported in a series of operational budgets developed annually by the staff and the library director. The amount of funding is divided using an allocation formula assigning distributable shares to each funding entity. Currently, the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine, Bloomberg School of Public Health, and School of Nursing, as well as the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, Johns Hopkins Howard County Medical Center, Sibley Memorial Hospital, Suburban Hospital, Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital, and the Kennedy Krieger Institute support the funding for the library. The library support also includes grant funding and other project-based accounts.