Levy Library

New Journal Backfiles: Annals of Internal Medicine and the Endocrine Society

The Library's online journal backfiles keep growing!  This week we have added some very popular journal backfiles: Annals of Internal Medicine and the collection of journals published by the Endocrine Society.  Mount Sinai users can now access every issue of the following journals online, all the way back to volume 1:

• Annals of Internal Medicine: back to 1927
• Endocrine Reviews: back to 1980
• Molecular Endocrinology: back to 1987
• The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism: back to 1941
• Endocrinology: back to 1917 (some issues of Endocrinology are still being added by the publisher).

Clinical Skills Week Resources

Last week was clinical skills week, when we got to meet all of the medical students entering their third year and learning some of the skills they'll need for their clerkships. One of those skills is being able to find the information necessary for patient care, so reference librarians Polly and Laura shared some of their favorite resources. Here they are, with a word about each:

PubMed: What library workshop would be complete with mention of PubMed? (OK, so there are a few). Specifically, remember MeSH searching, Boolean operators and the Limits tab, and try the Clinical Queries tool (found in the blue bar on the left side of the PubMed homepage) when you are looking for research studies for specific question types - e.g., therapy, diagnosis, prognosis, etc.

AccessMedicine, MDConsult, and the E-books database are good sources for textbook-style background information and sometimes images, videos, guidelines and more.

UpToDate (on campus only), eMedicine and PIER are full of clinical topic reviews that combine the latest evidence with expert recommendations.

ACP Journal Club and the Cochrane Library are evidence-based medicine resources: ACP Journal Club provides structured reviews and commentary on selected high-quality articles from 100+ journals, while the Cochrane Library publishes systematic reviews and meta-analyses of highly relevant topics. Search them separately using the above links, or together using EBM Reviews.

And, as always, you can Ask a Librarian. Happy third year!

More renovation news

In case you missed it, this email just went out from our Library Director about the progress of the Library renovation:

I am pleased to report that the Levy Library renovation is progressing.  For those of you who visit the library, you will have seen visible changes.

Beginning July 7, the 10th floor will be carpeted and painted.  This involves removing the old carpet, moving the stacks using specialized equipment and installing new carpet.  During this time, the 10th floor of the library will be closed to all users and the collection housed in that area (print journals) will be unavailable.  If you need material housed on the 10th floor, please speak with a staff member who will work with you to determine the best way to get what you need.  The online library collection will remain fully accessible.

We anticipate that the work on the 10th floor will be completed by July 18.  We look forward to the project being completed by the end of August.  There will be another brief library closure during the period where the elevator lobby and library entrance will be renovated and we will keep you posted.

Thanks for your cooperation and patience.

Weather and Mount Sinai

Part of the appeal of blogging is the ability to make timely reference to what's going on right now. Here in New York, one of the biggest topics is the weather: have you ever seen so much rain? Does the sun even exist?!  But what does that have to do with hospitals? Well, it turns out weather has impacted Mount Sinai quite a few times in the past. One of the earliest examples is the Blizzard of 1888, when only one Consulting physician, Emil Gruening, could make it to the Hospital, then located at Lexington Ave. and 66th Street. (It was also felt that the Blizzard added to an increase in cases of mastoiditis. Ironically, Gruening did the first successful mastoidectomy in the U.S. in 1892.)

    Fifty years ago, in 1959, there was an electrical blackout due to the heat and demands on the power grid. In 1977 lightening caused Con Ed to lose power across the city for more than a day. More recently, there was the heat wave in August of 2003 that brought on a City-wide blackout. This emergency saw Mount Sinai's medical students pitching in to do various tasks, including directing traffic on 98th and Madison and carrying food to patients. So, even weather has a Mount Sinai connection.

Independence Day Hours

If you see this weekend as more of an opportunity for research and study than for grilling and fireworks, you should know that the library will have limited hours: we're open regular hours (i.e., until 11:50 pm) today, but only from 9:00 - 4:50 tomorrow, and we're closed all day on Saturday. But don't fear, we'll be back to our regular hours at noon on Sunday.

Happy fourth!

Classes are back!

One of our new classrooms is now complete and we are happy to start scheduling our drop-in classes again! The schedule is up for July and includes classes in EndNote, NCBI Resources, PowerPoint, PubMed and RefWorks. Register for one today, and stay tuned for more classes later this summer!

July 9 4:00-5:30 EndNote X2: An Introduction
July 14 4:00-5:30 PowerPoint 2007: An Introduction
July 16 4:00-5:30 EndNote X2: Advanced Features
July 21 4:00-5:30 NCBI's Entrez and BLAST: An Introduction
July 22 4:00-5:30 PubMed: Finding the Evidence
July 23 4:00-5:30 RefWorks: An Introduction

Happy Bloomsday!

Today is Bloomsday, not the race in Spokane but the day Leopold Bloom spent wandering keyless through Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses. The novel has been read, studied, researched and written about over and over again, and not just by scholars of literature or language – it has made quite a mark in the medical literature as well, with articles about Ulysses and Joyce appearing in JAMA, BMJ and the Archives of Internal Medicine, to name a few. Titles found indexed in PubMed include “Anatomy in James Joyce’s Ulysses”, “James Joyce’s Ulysses and Dentistry”, “Life Lessons from Untimely Death in James Joyce’s Ulysses” – and that’s not even getting into articles about the author himself, with articles like “James Joyce: Seronegative Arthropathy or Syphilis?” and “James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Schizoid” to get us started.

So happy Bloomsday - perhaps tonight is a night to enjoy a nice glass of Burgundy and some gorgonzola while pondering what literature can teach about health and health care.

Ceiling, Walls, Paint...

The renovation continues behind the temporary walls at the Library. Probably the most visible change happening is the construction of new walls to house a new space for faculty collaboration (more details on this in future posts!). Here it is:
There's also been a lot of painting, and most of the dusty old ceiling panels and light fixtures have been replaced:
 
And, I'm happy to confirm that the long-lost women's restroom does still exist, and though it is still closed for now, it will reopen with the rest of Renovation Phase II.

Employee Recognition Poster Session - show us some love!

Librarians from the Levy Library will be on hand near our poster at the Employee Recognition Poster Session today. Come by the GP Atrium between 9:30 and 3:00 to say hi, grab some candy, and become our fan on facebook. All our new facebook fans will be entered in the Employee-to-Employee Appreciation Raffle Drawing, and we'll keep our profile updated with renovation news, new resources, photos and more. The theme of the poster session is I © Mount Sinai - so come by and show us some love!

NLM's Turning the Pages Online

There are some things that you see online that just make you say, WOW!  One such thing may be found on the website of the National Library of Medicine, in the Turning the Pages Online section (http://archive.nlm.nih.gov/proj/ttp/intro.htm).  On these pages can be found six famous titles in the history of medicine, brought to life by technology. The titles include Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica and Conrad Gesner’s Historiae Animalium.  Viewers can literally turn the pages of these wonderful sources and see every page of the volumes in high resolution images.  In addition, there are added features that help explain or highlight various sections of the text and images, making the experience more rich.  These books had once been available only to scholars who could travel to scattered libraries.  Now they are online and available to anyone with a good Internet connection.  Check it out and be amazed!