Spotlight

March 2008

The Gustave L. and Janet W. Levy Library at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine

Dedicated in 1974, the Gustave L. and Janet W. Levy Library is the leading provider of biomedical information for the Mount Sinai Medical Center.  The library was built on the success of the Mount Sinai Hospital’s Jacobi Library (founded in 1883), and currently enjoys over 290,000 visits each year. Through its use of innovative and emerging technologies to facilitate medical education, research, and clinical practice, the library serves as a knowledge center to connect faculty, students, and staff to information resources and services.

In the upcoming months, the Levy Library will undergo a renovation of its physical space to more effectively connect users to its services and to each other.  The library’s transition from a print collection to one that is primarily accessed electronically, has allowed us to extensively weed our print journal and monograph collections and create the conditions to transform the library from a collection-centered space to a user-centered space. The renovated library will be re-configured for interactive study and collaboration, and dedicated quiet study and research spaces will be added.  The library’s reference, circulation and computing help-desk services will be centralized and made more visible in order to more effectively answer the over thirty-five thousand questions received each year.  A consultation space will be developed to accommodate the growing requests from faculty to tap into the expertise of the library’s information professionals.

To promote scholarly communication, a faculty collaboration space, equipped with smart board and teleconferencing technology, will be built. Two new state of the art computer classrooms will be constructed to support the library’s educational programs, and to help meet the institutional demand for instructional space.  We are confident that our renovated library will give existing and future members of the Mount Sinai community an inviting environment that parallels the excellence that is consistently demonstrated throughout the institution.  We invite you to learn more about our renovation (http://fusion.mssm.edu/levy/renovation) and also to see the Levy Library’s re-designed web site (http://www.mssm.edu/library).