The interactive “Medical Inventions and Innovations” exhibit is produced by Dr. Martin E. Gordon.

The historical library houses one of the world’s finest historical medical collections. The collection contains over 130,000 books, bound manuscripts, journals and pamphlets. This includes 325 incunabula, which are books printed between 1450 and 1500, a wonderful Renaissance, Arabic and Persian manuscript collection along with hundreds of bound manuscripts form the 16th to the 20th centuries.

The Cushing/Whitney Historical Library also houses the Fry Collection of Prints and Drawings that spans five centuries, an additional 2500 portrait engravings and over 2000 original photographs. We have an artifact collection that includes over 1,000 medical and scientific instruments and the Streeter Collection of Weights and Measures containing several thousands items.

The Preservation Librarian for the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library began in August 2005 to establish a program that will preserve and conserve these collections. The exhibit, which will be on view from March 14th-June 11th , illustrates issues of preservation and solutions that can be achieved to safeguard this priceless collection.

Photos by John Curtis, Yale Medicine.

The library now has trial access to McGraw-Hill’s Access Surgery and Access Emergency Medicine through May 1, 2008. These products are designed for physicians and residents through integrating relevant, discipline-specific text and video resources from McGraw-Hill.

Also, the library now has a 3-month trial subscription to Eurekah Bioscience Database. Eurekah provides access to more than 240 e-books in the fields of Biology and Medicine from the publisher Landes Bioscience.

The library is pleased to announce Springer Protocols.

Springer Protocols compiles protocols from Humana Press’ successful book series Methods in Molecular Biology, Methods in Molecular Medicine, Methods in Biotechnology, Methods in Pharmacology and Toxicology, and Neuromethods, as well as a number of Laboratory Handbooks, such as The Biomethods Handbook, The Proteomics Handbook, and the Springer Laboratory Manuals.

Springer Protocols replaces the library’s previous subscription to BioMedProtocols which will be discontinued on April 15, 2008.

The library is pleased to announce online access to the complete backfiles of the Annals of the New York Academy of Science from v. 1 (1879) to present,

The purchase was jointly funded by the Kline Science Library and the Medical Historical Library.

The small town of Tugela Ferry and the Msinga District of KwaZulu Natal is the epicenter of HIV, TB, and newly discovered extensively drug resistant (XDR) TB. Home to 200,000 traditional Zulu people, the TB incidence is >1000/100,000 and the antenatal HIV seroprevalence rate is 25%. The health and medical needs are great and the resources scarce.

At the government district Church of Scotland Hospital and NGO Philanjalo, creative and remarkable efforts have been made to conbat TB/HIV and drug resistant TB. Yale faculty, residents, medical students, Infectious Diseases and Robert Woods Johnson Clinical fellows, Yale college students and faculty and students at the School of Nursing have all worked alongside South African colleagues. This exhibit attempts to capture and display this very special place and its people.

-Yale AIDS Program

We’ve recently made substantial updates to the Medical Library’s PDA Webpages. The pages include links to software available from the Medical Library, advice on recommended devices and instructions on how to access online resources from your mobile device. Information on iPhones and Blackberries is now included. Access the “PDA/Mobile Devices Resources & Information” page at http://www.med.yale.edu/library/technology/PDA/

A 3 p.m. ribbon-cutting ceremony to mark the opening of the interactive “Medical Inventions and Innovations” exhibit is the first in a series of events on Wednesday, April 16 that coincide with the 60th annual lecture sponsored by the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library Associates.

James H. Billington, 13th Librarian of Congress, will present the keynote address at 4 p.m. in Harkness Auditorium, Yale School of Medicine, 333 Cedar St. Billington’s lecture “Freedom as Strategy: the Importance of an Ideal” will be followed by a reception in the Medical Historical Library. The lecture, which honors the late Evelyn E. Gordon, is free and open to the public.

Interactive stations will display Dr. Billington’s personal tour of the nation’s Library of Congress and a special 3D video compilation of animations depicting groundbreaking medical teaching aids will also be on display. A concurrent exhibit “Preservation in the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library” will be on display in the rotunda of the library from March 24 to June 15.

An author and historian, as well as educator, Dr. Billington began his career as a history instructor at Harvard University and subsequently at Princeton University. He served as the director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. from 1973 to 1987. He was sworn in as Librarian of Congress on September 14, 1987.

Dr. Billington is the author of the “Icon and the Axe” (1966), “Fire in the Minds of Men” (1980), and most recently “Russia Transformed: Breakthrough to Hope” (1992). He has received numerous honorary degrees, is a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters of France and a recipient of the Gwanghwa Medal of the Republic of Korea. In 1992, he received Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson Award.

Established in 1948, the Medical Library Associates assist the Yale Medical Library in its mission of serving the information needs of Yale faculty, students and staff. The Associates have funded many projects including the digitization of the entire Fry Print Collection and the creation of a digital imaging center.

Freedom as Strategy: The Importance of an Ideal

James H. Billington, Ph.D.
Librarian/Director
The Library of Congress

Wednesday, April 16, 2008
3:00 pm Exhibit Opening
“Medical Inventions and Innovations”

4:00 pm Keynote Address
Harkness Auditorium, 333 Cedar Street

Faculty Survey Reveals High Rating for the Medical Library.

The results of the 2006-2007 Yale School of Medicine Faculty survey were released in February 2008. The work-life survey asked faculty to rate their overall satisfaction with working at Yale and resources in support of their work. According to the survey, 92% of faculty members reported satisfaction with library resources.

The survey was commissioned by the Office for Academic and Faculty Affairs at the Yale School of Medicine and developed by the Office of Institutional Research. The survey was administered to all School of Medicine ladder faculty who were appointed prior to January 1, 2006. Data was collected from late October 2006 to early January 2007.

To accommodate students preparing for the USMLE exams, the library will provide extended hours of service for all Yale affiliates from Sunday, March 9, to Saturday, June 7, 2008. The library will be open until 2:00 am, Sunday through Thursday. Please note that no desk services are available during extended study hours.

Library Hours:
Mon - Thurs 8:00 a.m. - Midnight * extended hours midnight - 2:00 a.m.
Fri 8:00 a.m. - 10:00 p.m., reduced service after 8:00 p.m.
Sat 10:00 a.m. - 10:00 p.m., reduced service after 7:00 p.m.
Sun 9:30 a.m. - Midnight * extended hours midnight - 2:00 a.m.

For security reasons, there will be a temporary change in off-campus access to SciFinder Scholar.  From March 6 - 19, 2008, SciFinder Scholar will be unavailable off-campus between the hours of midnight and 6:00 a.m.  On-campus access to SciFinder Scholar will be unaffected by this change and will continue to be available 24/7.

Aaron Donner, a 71 year old artist and furniture designer, developed acute leukemia in the spring of 2005. He underwent a thirty-seven day hospitalization for successful chemotherapy of his leukemia. During his prolonged hospital stay, he created a series of self-portraits as powerful witness to the physical diminishment and withering that are the necessary trade-off for survival with the disease and its treatment. But the portraits transcend the evidence for his physical deterioration by forcefully demonstrating that the withering of Aaron’s body was not paralleled by any withering or cachexia of his spirit.

We are replacing our old Macs with brand new 20” iMacs. They have larger displays, faster processors, SuperDrives (burn CDs and DVDs), and the newest version of OSX, Leopard.

Six iMac Research Workstations were deployed recently. During the last week of February we will be replacing the 6 logon “Productivity Macs” on the Information Room round table and 3 Productivity Macs in the Computer Resource Lab. Productivity Macs have MS Office 2004 and EndNote X.

Please contact a member of the Library Staff if you encounter any problems with the new computers or if you have questions about using them. We welcome your comments and suggestions.

medStation has replaced the former Y-Axis student Website. The Medical Library has a link at the bottom right of our homepage to facilicate access to the site.

A new law requires public access to research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The new NIH Public Access Policy replaces a voluntary system put into place in 2005. Beginning on April 7, 2008, researchers will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central. Full texts of the articles will be publicly available and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal.

Information and instructions about submitting NIH funded research papers can be found at http://www.nihms.nih.gov/web-help/index.html, or contact your department’s library liaison if you have additional questions .

Arnold Carl Klebs was one of the three physician/historians who offered to donate their libraries of rare books to Yale if Yale would build a place to house them. That place was the Yale Medical Library, now the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library. Son of the famous pathologist and bacteriologist Edwin Klebs, Arnold Klebs followed his father from Switzerland to America in 1896, becoming a noted tuberculosis specialist in Chiacgo. In 1909, having inherited wealth, Klebs returned to Switzerland where he devoted his career to the history of medicine. Harvey Cushing and Klebs met at Johns Hopkins in the first decade of the twentieth century and became lifelong friends. Thirty years later, Cushing suggested to Klebs that he and John F. Fulton join him in pledging their books to become the nucleus of a new medical historical collection at Yale.

This exhibit on Klebs’ life and scholarship, featuring books donated by Klebs and photographs, will be on display from February 1, 2008 to March 15, 2008.

Jorge Galvez, a resident in anesthesiology, won the Yale Links Contest. Congratulation Jorge!

Jorge’s video won the prize, an iPod Touch:

Blackboard will be unavailable from 7 AM Saturday, January 18th through 5 PM, Sunday, January 19th for a critical upgrade. This upgrade includes several patches and an upgrade of the Oracle backend database. Please plan your Blackboard work accordingly. If you have any questions, please contact Judy Spak at judy.spak@yale.edu.

The Medical Library recently updated the Reserve Room, purchasing more than one hundred new editions of standard textbooks. The editions in the Reserve Room should now be the latest available. Please let us know if you find any titles that are not current.

In December, the Medical Library retired the databases used to power the library’s ejournals and ebooks pages. Maintaining the accuracy of these databases was labor-intensive and became unsustainable as the number of online journals and books continued to increase. The same information was also being managed in the Library Catalog (Orbis) and SFX Link Resolver (Yale Links), creating additional inefficiencies as library staff attempted to keep all three systems up-to-date.

The ejournals and ebooks pages now pull data from Orbis and Yale Links. The improvements in data management and accuracy have resulted in the loss of some search and display functionality.  The library has formed a project team to address these search and display issues through building new resource discovery tools which will use data harvested from Orbis.

If you have additional questions, please contact daniel.dollar@yale.edu