The beginnings of the library and information services at the University of Zagreb School of Medicine (UZSM) are closely related to the establishment of the UZSM in 1917. The Central Medical Library (CML) began operating and got its current name in 1947, with the primary goal of establishing specialized library services and bringing together collections from multiple individual departmental and clinical libraries under the central library.
In its operations, the CML keeps up with the world's leading medical libraries, and also follows modern trends in medical librarianship and information science. The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus and the NLM classification scheme, both created by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM; Bethesda, USA), began to be applied in the 1970s. Particular attention was paid to the systematic acquisition of international scientific periodicals and other important secondary publications in the field of biomedicine and health. The automation of library operations began in the mid-1980s, along with activities on the bibliographic database Biomedicina Croatica. During the 1990s, the CML began to take part in the UZSM's teaching activities.
In 2005, the CML started organizing the Medical Information Conference Croatia (MICC), intended for healthcare professionals, students, and librarians and information professionals, focusing on current and trending topics related to medical and health information. In 2006, the CML established the first institutional repository in Croatia, a digital collection of free full-text documents resulted from the UZSM's educational, scientific and professional activities.