Levy Library

Library Resource Apps and Mobile-Optimized Sites

Attention Mount Sinai iphone, ipad, blackberry, android and other mobile device users!  Many of the Levy Library's core resources provide mobile applications (apps) and mobile-optimized sites for accessing content.  Librarians have compiled the lists below which include some very useful apps. Perhaps the best news?  All of the apps are included in our library license negotiations and are provided at no cost to Mount Sinai faculty, students, and staff!

Our list of apps: http://library.mssm.edu/reference/apps.shtml includes apps for accessing clinical and drug information, searching the medical literature, accessing e-journals, e-books, and medical images, and searching the library's catalog.

View our list of mobile-optimized sites: http://library.mssm.edu/reference/mobile.shtml to access Levy Library licensed resources from your mobile browser.

We hope these apps and mobile sites will be useful to all of our Mount Sinai physicians, nurses, medical students and other health care providers who carry smartphone or mobile devices!  If you have any comments or questions, please send us an email.

EndNote Tech Tip

 Most of our savvy EndNote users know that if they want to use their EndNote library on multiple computers they should keep their library on a flash drive.  And many users also know that if you need an Output Style that isn't in the default format, you can download it from the Endnote website by opening the Style Manager and clicking "Get More on the Web."  But if your library is on a flash drive, where do you put the downloaded style so that you can use it?

The answer is: Output Styles always need to be in the EndNote Styles folder, which will usually be under Program Files on the C: drive.  You can save the style on your flash drive so that you'll always have it, but on each computer you use you will need to copy that style file to C:\Program Files\Endnote X4\Styles. 

As always, if you have trouble with this or anything else EndNote-related you can contact us at Ask-a-Librarian.

SciFinder is now Mobile

Good news! You can now use SciFinder Scholar on your smartphone to look up substances, authors, research topics and companies, as well as review the results of any "Keep Me Posted" alerts you've set up. If you're already signed up for SciFinder Scholar access at Mount Sinai, then you're already signed up for smartphone access. You don't have to download an app, and there are (thank goodness!) no restrictions on the number of concurrent users, or what IP address you are coming from. Just point your browser to scifinder.cas.org/mobile and log in with your SciFinder username and password.

If you don't have a SciFinder Scholar username and password yet, you can register for one using your Mount Sinai email address.

If you're wondering what SciFinder Scholar is, well, it's the premier chemistry bibliographic and reference research tool from the American Chemical Society (ACS). It's a great place to go to find chemistry articles and information: and remember, "chemistry" includes pharmaceuticals, DNA, bioactive substances - a lot more than you might think. So take a look, and if you have any questions or want a hand, just ask!

New User-Friendly Website and Catalog

We're happy to announce that an extensive redesign of the library website is complete! Here is a sneak peak of our sleek new interface, which will go live when the server updates occur next Thursday:

 
 

We've gotten the message from you that some important functions, like Menu Maintenance are difficult to find on our current site. But with the new, highly usable design, you can just hit F1! And we've made sure to gather all of our most important resources together in this one easy-to-use page. Whether you are looking for Data Base Management, Scient. Amer. Discotest, or Spreadsheet, it is all right there, just one keystroke away!

Along with the Library homepage, we've also tweaked our catalog interface. You may not notice many changes, but we've tried to make the design more in-tune with the rest of the site. As always, this is the best place to go to search for books, journals, videocassettes and slide collections!

We hope you like the new designs as much as we do. Please tell us what you think! 

New Subscription: OpenHelix Bioinformatics Tutorials

Ever tried to find your way around dbSNP, UniProt, or KEGG? Gotten lost in miRBase or the Gene Ontology? Found that the developers of a tool you need didn't quite get around to developing a useful "Help" link? The Library is here for you! We're happy to announce our new subscription to OpenHelix's bioinformatics tutorials. Each one inculdes a narrated tutorial video, downloadable PowerPoint slides and exercises you can complete for practice. And best of all, they keep the tutorials updated to relect changes in the resources. Right now, there are nearly 100 tutorials ranging from genome databases to pathway resources to algorithms and analysis tools, and there are more to come!

You can access the OpenHelix tutorials, both on campus and off, from the Library's Databases page: http://librarycf.mssm.edu/levy/databases/, in the Bioinformatics section.

When Saving Isn't Enough

I was speaking to a researcher the other day, and I heard - once again - the familiar refrain of, "You mean it's only on paper?"  Yup, imagine that.  The whole issue of paper versus electronic records makes me fairly crazy, mostly because I don't trust electronic records, or maybe I just don't trust mankind's ability right now to deal with digital records over the long term.  How many of us can right now put their hands on a document that they created and stored electronically 20 years ago?  15 years?  Do I hear 10 or even 5?  All those great digital photographs that you have created over the years, can you still find and view them all?  Do you have your plan set up to migrate them forward onto new technology as it arrives?  Is it all backed up, described and findable?

It is not that electronic records are 'bad' and paper is 'good', but electronic files are deceptively easy: just hit save.  What is much harder in the real world of archives is that we are trying to 'save' things permanently, so that first save is just one of many unending steps required for the care and maintenance of digital documents.  Archivists need to ensure that the information in each record is saved in a manner that will allow it to be viewed on whatever new software and hardware evolves in the future.  On top of that, they need to ensure that when that record is displayed in the future, that the users can be certain that this is in fact a true representation of what that record originally contained; that bits and bytes haven't been compressed and lost; that the data hasn't been altered by users over time.  All of this makes putting paper into acid-free folders and boxes and arranging them (once) in neat record series - all described in a searchable inventory - seem beyond easy.

Trying to oversee the many complex aspects of identifying and preserving archival electronic records is a tremendous task that archivists of today, myself included, cannot escape.  But when I can reach out and actually touch the paper that was created almost 160 years ago, it is a satisfying relief and a real connection to the past.  I am not at all sure that people in the future will be able to experience that connection to the people of the early digital generations.

Edison Speaks!

We all know that technology is a double edged sword: it provides new ways to do familiar things better and can even create new needs that we never knew we had.  (Who knew we needed to send strangers personal information about ourselves in blocks of 140 characters or less?!)  But it also has a downside, including the loss of masses of information and images as technologies become obsolete.  (Have you played that 8 track tape lately, or looked at those old 8 mm home movies?) 

But sometimes technology can also work to save treasures that have been passed over by time.  Such is the case with some recently restored radio broadcasts that were recorded by a pallophotophone.  This was invented by Charles Hoxie, a GE engineer, in the early 1920s. Using 35 mm sprocketless film, each strip contained eight to 10 parallel soundtracks etched on acetate and nitrate film.  Light bouncing off a tiny mirror exposed each strip of film and captured the sound.  A series of the pallophotophone recordings were found by an archivist, but he could not listen to them without a player.  Enter two engineers who developed a way to emulate the pallophotophine using modern technology.  Two years later, the hidden sound emerged, including a speech by Thomas Edison from 1929.

To read the full article and hear the audio of Edison speaking, please go to this link:

http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=942480

Planned internet, email outage tonight

Might be a good idea to schedule a walk in the park tonight from 8-10 pm, because there is network maintenance scheduled and several systems will be unavailable. You won't be able to access WebEd, online resources from the Library or, if you are on the Exchange system, your email. In fact, depending where you are, you may not be able to access the internet at all: there will be no internet access in the Library, on floors 5, 10-14 and 16-26 of Annenberg, anywhere in Aron Hall or the Atran buidling, Icahn floors 1 and 9-16, or at the SAVI program in 40 East 98th St.

If you have questions, you can contact the Levy Library Computing Help Desk at x47091 or helpdesk@mssm.edu. The network folks apologize for the inconvenience, but are happy to be upgrading our networks!

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!

Medpedia Launches

Last week a potentially exciting new tool, Medpedia, was released in beta form.  Medpedia, like the extremely popular Wikipedia, is a wiki - a collaborative and free encyclopedia edited by a group of interested volunteers. However, Medpedia is focused on providing information for health, medicine, and the body.  Only carefully screened physicians and Ph.D.s are allowed to edit the articles.  It currently offers what looks like a few hundred articles on biomedical topics.  Sounds like a very interesting project.