Images are very much used in the health area, both for the professional practice as for education. As a result, there is a constant search of ways to store them, organize them and retrieve them. The present article describes an environment developed for this purpose, which allows professionals to share them with other members of the community. For that purpose, a digital format with web interface was chosen, in which the images were catalogued with a specific protocol, indexed based on the description text and classified with the Bireme DeCs controlled vocabulary. The consultation was created based on the Boolean model, using metadata and hierarchical research. The result of the search was ordered according to the relevance of each image. The final product of the work was named Medicine Image Virtual Library (BVIM), making available areas of public and restricted access, the latter used as management interface and means for the cooperators to feed the image assets.
Medical images; Virtual library; Digital library; Image banks; Preservation of information
