Objectives: The James Lind Library (www.jameslindlibrary.org) has been created to improve public and professional general knowledge about fair tests of treatments in health care. Methods: Short essays explaining the principles of fair tests are available in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese. A 100-page book – ‘Testing Treatments’ – is available free through the website, both in English and in Arabic translation. To illustrate the evolution of fair tests of treatments from 2000 BCE to the present, The James Lind Library contains key passages and images from manuscripts, books, and journal articles, many of them accompanied by commentaries, biographies, portraits, and other relevant material. A multinational editorial team oversees the development of the website, which is based at the Sibbald Library of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. Assessment: In 2003, ‘Scientific American’ awarded The James Lind Library a Sci/Tech Web Award. Judges representing the journal considered 1000 websites across all of science and selected 50 for awards. Five of these were in the ‘Medicine’ category. The James Lind Library was the only one of these five sites to have been created outside the US. The website has tens of thousands of visitors every month, and several print journals have started republishing authored material which was originally commissioned for publication in The James Lind Library. A feedback function for visitors has helped us to develop the website. Development: New material is being added to the website continuously, as relevant new records are identified and as methods for testing treatments evolve. For example, a recently added record is a 2006 report of an assessment of the extent of concordance between research on the effects of drugs in animals and in humans. Over the next few years, we plan to develop a new section of The James Lind Library to promote wider understanding of epidemiological ideas and the evolution of the methods used in epidemiological research.