Director's Desk

On behalf of the entire Himmelfarb Library staff, I would like to extend a warm welcome to all new Medical Center faculty, staff, and students. I would also like to extend greetings to all returning faculty and students on the start of a new academic year. The Library staff looks forward to meeting your information needs in the upcoming months. We also welcome your input! You may contact me at 202-994-1826 or mlbaml@gwumc.edu. The Library's e-mail address is library@gwumc.edu. The telephone number for the reference desk is 202-994-2850.

The Library starts off the new academic year in a strong position. The Library recently expanded its core of electronic journals to 700 and updated its resources in long-term care, complementary medicine, ophthalmology, and computer simulations for internal medicine and primary care. Be sure to check our catalog (http://www.gwumc.edu/library/) for complete holdings! Patrons ordering documents through interlibrary loan and the Himmelfarb Photocopy Service now submit all requests online and may also request electronic delivery of articles to the desktop computer. The GWPrints, print accounting system, will debut at Himmelfarb, and other campus libraries, on September 3rd. Students and faculty with laptops can use them to acess the Library's electronic resources and the Internet through the wireless LAN installed on the third floor. Full details on these last two projects appear later in this newsletter. Finally, the Library, working with a consortium of local academic libraries, has negotiated a new contract with Ovid, providing access to 27 online clinical textbooks, 74 additional electronic journals, and the "Openlinks" feature. With "Openlinks," patrons searching Ovid MEDLINE will be able to link directly from citations to the full-text of many major journals.

Best wishes for a successful year!

Anne Linton, Director,
Library Services