The southwest corner of the HMS campus, where Countway Library stands, could have turned into a lonely patch of real estate. With journals and even entire books becoming available online, fewer people have been making their way through the library doors. Over the past two years, the Countway has been drawing people back—not to study in solitude but to engage in community activities such as book signings and symposia, including a recent one celebrating the 300th birthday of the great taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus.

This summer, researchers and clinicians will have another reason to make their way to the Countway. By then, its fourth floor will have been transformed from a series of carrels and library stacks into an expansive and airy meeting place—the new home of the Center for Biomedical Informatics (CBMI). “It will be a real workplace with an emphasis on openness and collaboration,” said Alexa McCray, HMS associate professor of medicine and co-director of CBMI along with Isaac Kohane, the Lawrence J. Henderson associate professor of pediatrics and health sciences and technology. McCray is deputy director and Kohane is director of Countway Library.

The pair, working with colleagues, conceived of the center two years ago as a place—both virtual and real—for clinicians and researchers to come together to engage in multidisciplinary translational research. The idea was that in an age of burgeoning information, the opportunity has never been greater to find cures for disease. Yet because the information is coming in from so many different sources and in such different forms, finding meaningful patterns in the data has been a real challenge.

That is the center’s goal—to use the tools of information science, or informatics, in the service of finding cures. “What we’re really about is biomedical informatics. What we’re really looking at is the entire translational pathway, from bench to bedside to practice,” said McCray.

Though its quarters in the Countway are still being renovated, the center has been up and running for months. Last fall, it cosponsored a conference to discuss a Harvard-initiated movement to put medical records into the hands of patients, the personally controlled health record initiative (see Focus, Oct. 27, 2006), and will be hosting another in September. It has also been working with a Boston-wide consortium of researchers whose goal is to better understand and treat autism. The Autism Consortium plans to enroll 1,200 families affected by autism and to collect genetic and behavioral information, as well as imaging and epidemiological data.

“These are highly disparate data,” McCray said. “But that’s what makes it exciting. Now you can ask questions across all these different data types that you never would have been able to ask before because generally people work in their own areas.”

The center’s staff, which includes people with backgrounds in bioinformatics, computer science, clinical medicine, and library science, will be developing hands-on bioinformatic tools that the autism—and other—researchers can use to analyze data. “They’ll be bringing databases, and we’ll be creating the tools that allow them to query across all these data sources,” said McCray.

Meanwhile, she and her colleagues are dreaming up other ways to bring people together. “We have this cool idea of a matchmaking service whereby if I’m a researcher and I’m interested in collaborating with, say, a biostatistician, we’ll have a database of people who are willing to collaborate,” she said. They have even been mining bibliographic databases to identify Harvard researchers who have published in similar areas. “It might be people who are right on the edge of what it is that you’re working on,” she said. “The kind of bibliomining that we’re doing would bring those to the fore. It’s a collaborative tool that people haven’t exploited yet.”

“Having the center in the library is meaningful and symbolic,” said Elissa Weitzman, HMS assistant professor of pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Boston and a member of the center. “It raises questions—What does a library look like? How will it function?”