Levy Library

Records Management Comes to Mount Sinai

Usually I write about something from Mount Sinai's past.  I try to show its relevance to the present day, but it is still looking back. Today I want to tell you a little about a very forward-looking program in which the Archives Division of the Library is involved, and that is rolling out a records and information management program for The Mount Sinai Medical Center.  We have hired our first ever professional Records Manager, Miriam Gianni, and she is working with our Records Consultant, Dr. William Saffady. They are visiting offices around the Medical Center, to see what records are created and stored. From those interviews they will draft retention schedules of how long records need to be kept. At the end of that process, departments will be able to actively manage the records they create and be able to more easily find the information they need when they need it.  In other words: throw things away, free up office space, become more information efficient.  An ancillary but important gain from this initiative in the future will be allowing the institution to finally tame the off-site storage tiger that costs us thousands and thousands of dollars every year.  Each department is appointing a records coordinator to work with our Records Manager.  Maybe you will see Miriam and Bill in your area soon. 

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.

Play Ball!

It's spring and baseball season is upon us once more. (Go Mets!)  It is a time when thousands of average people dig out their cleats, grab their glove and head for the field.  For years, Mount Sinai has supported teams and entire leagues in a variety of sports, from bowling to basketball, but baseball (and softball) are the two that are still around.  This photo shows a Mount Sinai sponsored baseball team.  We have no information about this image except what can be inferred from the picture itself, but that can supply a few choice details.  Such as: this was probably taken in the 1940s, as evidenced by the man in the suit in the middle, Joseph Turner, MD, the Director of The Mount Sinai Hospital until 1948.  Which leads to another interesting fact: it took major league baseball until 1947 to allow an African-American player to join (Jackie Robinson, of course).   Mount Sinai seems to have reached that milestone sooner than that, truly reflecting the diversity of its staff.  Play ball!

Happy Library Week!

We don't have any elaborate plans here at the Levy Library (maybe a trip or two down to that ice cream machine in the cafeteria), and we're not yet ready to show off our new and improved space - though we are still open for business and would love to have you visit. But it is a week for celebration - an annual week of "celebration of the contributions of our nation's libraries and librarians". There are festivities and commemorations big and small going on at all kinds of libraries across the country, part of the annual observation going back to 1958. I really like last year’s National Library Week videos from the American Library Association: here’s my favorite (thanks to the NPR Library blog for pointing them out):

Public Access to Public Research

It's been almost exactly a year since the NIH Public Access Mandate took effect. Those of you with NIH grants know - or really, really should know - about this mandate, which requires that researchers make journal-accepted manuscripts reporting NIH-funded research publicly available. The manuscripts must be submitted to the PubMed Central database once they are accepted; depending on the wishes of the author or publisher (and remember that for most journals, you sign away your copyright to the publisher when the article is accepted), they may be held by PubMed Central for up to a year before being released. Submitting your manuscripts to PubMed Central is important: the NIH requires it and we hear that they having been checking for compliance. There are some big consequences for noncompliance (including possible grant suspension or termination) so you should make sure you're getting it done - take a look at http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ or the Mount Sinai-specific guide at http://www.mssm.edu/library/reference/nih.shtml for more information.

You may also know that this issue has been controversial: proponents argue that research funded by taxpayer dollars should be available to everyone, instead of only to researchers at institutions that can afford to subscribe to peer-reviewed journals (remember that institutional journal subscriptions frequently cost up to tens of thousands of dollars per year). Opponents say this mandate threatens the centuries-old subscription model, and maybe even peer review and scholarly communication in its entirety. There's been a lot of information published about the issue, everywhere from Nature to the Washington Post to the blogosphere.

Libraries, libraries everywhere!

Occasionally we hear from some of you who are looking for things like works of literature or fiction, language learning materials, books on tape or other things that would be useful to you in your work or personal life but that we don't have in our collection. We do have a browse-worthy, though kind of small, Leisure Reading collection, and a few useful books like Say it in Spanish: A Guide for Health Care Professionals, but because we focus on science and health care, our collection outside of these areas is limited. But, there are lots of other ways to make sure those needs are met - one of my favorite resources is the abundance of public libraries available to us in the city. Just a few blocks away, well within lunch-break stroll-able distance for most of us, is the 96th Street branch of the New York Public Library. Anyone who lives, works, pays property taxes, or attends school in New York is eligible for a library card, and once you're set up with a card you can not only borrow books, CDs and DVDs from the 96th St. branch, but have them sent there from other NYPL branches around the city. This means a pretty incredible collection of books, music, movies and lots more available to you, for free, just a few blocks away.

Free Videos from NIH

The National Institutes of Health host frequent events at their campus in Bethesda MD, many of which are open to external researchers and the public - if you can get to Bethesda. But they're also extending their reach far beyond the Beltway by posting video and audio files of hundreds of events and seminars on the web. The NIH VideoCasting and Podcasting page lists them by date and by topic. Browse through a wide variety of lectures from "Translational Studies on the Met Tyrosine Kinase Receptor System in the Autisms" to "The Science of Failure in Medicine" to "Preparing for Grant e-submission: a Tutorial for Postdocs", and many more. You can download them individually to view with QuickTime, or subscribe to them via iTunes or RSS.

Darwin and Lincoln

It was a busy week last week and I didn't have time to write much, but last Thursday was a notable day: the 200th birthday of both Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. There was a lot written about both Darwin and Lincoln in newspapers, journals, blogs, etc. that day, so I just want to point out a few relevant resources from the Levy Library. Of course, we provide access to On the Origin of Species (published 150 years ago this year!) - search ebrary to find that title. We also have subscriptions to journals like Science and Nature, which have been including a lot of Darwin-themed material already this year. And PubMed can direct you to articles about Lincoln in medical journals. One of my favorite resources though, is the Historical New York Times from ProQuest. You can use nytimes.com or LexisNexis to find recent Times articles, but ProQuest lets me sit at the Reference Desk today and read an article from 1860 about "Mr. Darwin's remarkable work" which has a "delightful tone" and "fine atmosphere", "whatever may be one's intellectual attitude towards his biologic doctrine" and an article from April 15, 1865 entitled "President Lincoln Shot by Assassin". Articles from 1851-2004 are scanned into PDF and fully searchable - a great resource for research (or semi-productive time wasting!).

There is grandeur in this view of life...

...with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

-Charles Darwin, Feb. 12 1809 - April 19, 1882

Genomics of Common Diseases

Yesterday afternoon was the first lecture in the Genomics of Common Disease seminar series, sponsored by the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, the Department of Medicine, and the Charles R. Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine. Dr. Robert Desnick, the Chairman of the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, gave us all an "Introduction to Genomics" - the evolution of the field with regard to medicine, the current state of research, and expectations for the future. A list of relevant literature had been sent out before the lecture, and he also mentioned a few more articles over the course of the talk - they are:

Attia, J et al. How to use an article about genetic association. JAMA. 2009;301(1):74-81.

Smyth, DJ et al.Shared and distinct genetic variants in Type 1 Diabetes and Celiac Disease. NEJM. 2008;359:2767-2777.

And the current issue of Nature Genetics, which has several articles reporting the results of Genome-Wide Association Studies.

(Above links work on-campus only). And remember - if you have a citation (or list of citations!) that you want to find the full-text for, there are several ways to do it. You can find the article in PubMed, then use LinkOut or FindIt to get the full-text, you can search our E-journals database to look for the journal online and our Catalog to look for the journal in print, and you can request an article through Interlibrary Loan if we don't have it. And, as always, you can ask us if you are having any problems finding something!