Ask a Librarian

Ask a Librarian

About The TMC Library

The Texas Medical Center (TMC) is home to the largest concentration of medical professional and experts anywhere in the world. Collectively, the Texas Medical Center is the largest employer in Houston and the 8th largest business district in the United States. The TMC includes 50 medicine-related institutions, including 21 hospitals and two specialty institutions, two medical schools, six nursing schools, and schools of dentistry, public health, and pharmacy. The TMC Library plays a vital role for the institutions inhabiting the 2.10 square mile campus that is the TMC.

The TMC Library is one of the 50+ institutions that make up the Texas Medical Center. Unique to medical and research libraries across the country, The TMC Library is a private, stand-alone, and not-for-profit organization independent from any university or research institution. In 2020, we concluded a major renovation to modernize our space to better meet the needs of current and future students, faculty, staff, and researchers.

As the Library serving all other TMC member institutions, it is one of the most inclusive and collaborative spaces on the campus. We provide a depth and breadth of electronic resources that rival other medical libraries, and we do so as cost efficiently as possible. We also provide a quiet space for study and provide communal space for people from different institutions to meet at a central TMC location.

Library Interior with Chairs and Study Tables

The TMC Library is a valuable resource because:

  • It provides information researchers need to write grant proposals that fund cutting-edge research and scientific discovery.
  • It provides the latest medical information clinicians readily need to make better, faster diagnoses.
  • It provides students with the information, resources, services, and space they need to learn and succeed.
  • The TMC Librarians provide expert search services for systematic reviews and other research activities.
  • It is essential for institutional accreditation with SACS, LCME, and JCAHO.
  • As a consortium library, it saves member institutions of the TMC millions of dollars annually were each to have their own independent libraries with the same breadth and depth of resources.

Everyone in the Texas Medical Center, regardless of institutional affiliation, benefits from the Library.

The official name of the Library is “Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center Library.” It is located at 1133 John Freeman Blvd., conveniently situated between the two major medical schools on the TMC campus, Baylor College of Medicine and the McGovern Medical School of The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. It employs a complete administrative, professional, and executive staff. The Library operates under a DBA as The TMC Library.

Vital to Success

“The Library is extremely valuable. It’s essential to our basic work.
It’s a key factor in our accreditation and in us being able to
maintain excellence vs. mediocrity.”
-Dr. Patricia Starck, Dean of the School of Nursing at UTHealth

“The Library is a source of support for Baylor that drives our
engine and that cannot be denied.”
-Lynn C. Yeoman (ret), PhD, Director of UME Office & ERC, Professor of Pharmacology, Baylor College of Medicine