Judy Palmer, head librarian for the Oxfordshire region found that 'libraries were becoming increasingly marginalised, librarians were facing competition from other providers, that there were no recognisable national strategies, that there was massive duplication, fragmentation and information hoarding'[2] In response to such concerns the British Library organised a seminar on NHS libraries, which came to be known as the Cumberlege Seminar.
[5] The idea of an open access digital library of high quality health related information was suggested by JA Muir Gray to Frank Burns CBE, at the time Chief Executive of Wirral NHS Trust Warrington and leading the development of Information for Health, an IT strategy for the NHS 1998-2005.
[8] Robert Ward, a senior civil servant at the Department of Health, convened a meeting of interested parties in Leeds.
The NeLH programme was included in the first portfolio of the NHS Information Authority; work began on implementation in January 1999, with the appointment of a project manager, Peter Bladen who had developed an electronic library service within the Special Hospitals service, and a project assistant Carol Shanley, based in the NHSIA's temporary offices in Calthorpe Road, Birmingham.
With the demise of the NHSIA in 2005 the NeLH transferred its staff and operations to Connecting for Health, the body responsible for implementing the NHS National Programme for IT.
Successes include: the business case was recognized by HM Treasury as a model of its kind; the project was delivered to time and budget and became a valued service; funding was obtained to make the Cochrane Library available across the UK on a simple open basis; extra funding for Clinical Evidence was secured from the Modernisation Fund; a care pathways database was introduced; obstacles were overcome to make the Athens Access Management System available to the NHS as part of the NLH enterprise architecture; Health Language, a terminology service, was procured as a framework contract; the Children's BNF was introduced, funded by the Department of Health; Hitting the Headlines and Zetoc were procured; the fee paid by the NHS to the Copyright Licensing Agency was halved; co-operation with JISC increased; the PRODIGY programme was cancelled and replaced by Clinical Knowledge Summaries.
Among the failures: a z39.50 federated search supplied by Fretwell Downing could not be made to work; attempts to base the CLA licence on actual usage foundered; work with JISC to reduce double-dipping by academic publishers across HE-NHS made little progress; reform of the NHS libraries regional structure was only partly successful and the vision of a unified networked library for the NHS didn't survive; integration with CFH products and services was less than anticipated; a strategic partnership with Map of Medicine fell foul of the CFH commercial directorate; a planned partnership with ISABEL didn't survive the CFH procurement process.
Perhaps the key failures were not to embed the vision of NLH in the hearts and minds of senior stakeholders and those it was intended to serve, and to pay too little attention to sustainability.
Experiments included: a pilot of LibQual; the development of an XML standard for representing clinical guidelines; a DSpace implementation hosted by Hewlett Packard Laboratories; an RSS feed manager developed by Microsoft as part of its NHS Common User Interface project; and a browser based calendar and communication tool known as MyWorkPlace - a great idea but technically ahead of the technology available to the NHS at the time.
Some elements of the NeLH infrastructure are still visible, notably OpenAthens, and the single-search engine (Healthcare Databases Advanced Search (HDAS)).