We are moving significant parts of the collection offsite because the NYAM Library is about to begin the stack renovation project for which it was awarded a Save America's Treasures grant in 2008. Save America's Treasures grants are awarded by a number of government agencies working in partnership, including the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, the National Park Service, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute for Museum and Library Services. The purpose of the grants is "to conserve significant U.S. cultural and historic treasures, which illustrate, interpret and are associated with the great events, ideas, and individuals that contribute to our nation's history and culture." The NYAM Library received $500,000 to improve the environmental conditions in the stack areas in which a large portion of the Library's older and more fragile materials are stored. Additional money for the completion of this project came from Borough President Scott Stringer's office. The upgrades will provide us with much safer storage conditions for much of the rare book collection, archives and manuscripts, and many of our older monographs.

During this time, the Library staff remains committed to assisting patrons with their research needs. The rare book collections, the periodical collection, the health pamphlet collection and monographs from the mid-twentieth century forward will continue to be available for use. Librarians will try to help patrons find alternate sources for materials that they will be temporarily unable to access at NYAM.

Questions about these materials and their availability may be directed to Arlene Shaner, the Assistant Curator and Reference Librarian for Historical Collections, at 212-822-7313.

The dates for the class are: January 27 and January 29. All classes will take place in the Hartwell Room at 4pm. The actual class will take about 30 min after which you are welcome to stay and ask any questions you may have about the Library's resources.

Please contact Winifred King if you are interested in attending.

In order to manage situations effectively in the workplace, one must understand both formal and informal decision making processes.

Management positions are often filled with operationally capable people who do not necessarily have social capacity. Yet, the higher up one moves in the organizational structure, the more important it becomes to be able to navigate the increasingly complex social structure. Effective leaders posses self-awareness, yet they are also aware of the emotional needs of their subordinates.

Effective leaders ask difficult questions, challenge established beliefs, hold people accountable, and try to reach a consensus.

And lastly, effective leaders focus on their followers not themselves. Or, as one speaker put it, if you want to be a leader, "Check your ego at the door!"

AgeLine focuses exclusively on the population aged 50+ and issues of aging. AgeLine covers the literature of social gerontology and includes aging-related content from the health sciences, psychology, sociology, social work, economics, and public policy. This database indexes over 600 journals, books, book chapters, reports, dissertations, consumer guides, and educational videos. Publication coverage is from 1978 to the present, with selected coverage from 1966-1977. This database is not full-text.

The Health Policy Reference Center is a comprehensive full-text database designed to support the informational needs of corporations, medical institutions, government agencies, and other entities relative to health policy. Its extensive scope and content provide users with a wealth of extremely useful information essential to all aspects of the health policy discipline. This collection offers unmatched full-text coverage of information relevant to many areas integral to health policy including, but not limited to: health care access, health care quality, health care financing, etc. The database features hundreds of thousands of records, and offers complete coverage of more than 200 full-text titles. Searchable cited references are also provided.

If you have any questions about searching using either of these databases please contact your Library Liaison or call the Reference Desk (x7315).

• The Emergency Access Initiative is a collaborative partnership between NLM, the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM) and participating publishers to provide free access to full-text articles and select reference books to healthcare professionals and libraries affected by disasters.
• To help assist the thousands of aid workers responding to the Haiti earthquake, K4Health has organized the Haiti Relief Toolkit, a collection of practical and technical resources to help health workers respond more effectively to the relief efforts underway.
  We are seeking your input to ensure that the toolkit is as practical and relevant as possible. Practical resources such as manuals, guidelines, and checklists are welcome. The toolkit covers all vital sectors related to disaster relief, including health, water and sanitation, food security, and shelter, as well as key field activities supporting the operations, such as logistics. Resources should focus on meeting both immediate emergency needs and long-term recovery efforts. Please contribute materials in English, French, Spanish, and Creole, as available. Please use the toolkit's discussion board to discuss issues, suggest additional resources, and comment on existing content. A list of current contributors appears on the About page. To browse the contents of the toolkit, use the tabs to view key topics. You can also use the Quick Links from the Home page to access key information quickly, such as maps of Haiti and a list of relief organizations working on the ground. The toolkit is accessible online, but K4Health will also be uploading it to flash drives and shipping them to Haiti so that those on the front line can access the information easily and quickly.
• Resources dealing with earthquakes have also been recently added to the Library's Resource Guide for Public Health Preparedness.

The forward states, “Complete Streets are those that are designed for the safety and comfort of all road users, regardless of age and ability. Naturally, this definition should extend to the needs of older road users. But does it in practice? And do the engineering solutions offered for older drivers work for pedestrians and bicyclists, the major focus of the Complete Streets movement?” This report from the AARP Public Policy Institute is the result of an interdisciplinary group put together to investigate the safety and make policy and design recommendations to building safe and livable streets.

“This document identifies some of the main approaches used to address gender equity in health systems, elaborating on three examples in order to suggest how these methods might be developed in the context of health policies across Europe.
The underlying causes of the gender gap in health which might be addressed by health systems and health care services include differences between women and men in their use of preventive health care, their health behaviours and in their access to health care and treatment – all of which affect health outcomes for women and men. It is difficult to calculate the exact proportion of the gender gap that can be attributed to gender inequality in the planning and delivery of health services. However, the consequences of not addressing gender are likely to include persistent excess mortality among men, underuse, and inefficient use, of health resources, poor user satisfaction and, for some countries, perhaps, a widening gender gap in health.”

Both these items have been collected for the Library's Grey Literature Report and are found in the library catalog.

The son of an Irish clergyman, Oliver Goldsmith was destined for a career in the church. The story told of this aborted career choice is that he presented himself for examination to the Bishop in a pair of scarlet breeches. He was apparently found unworthy of a church career and rejected. A generous uncle next interceded on his behalf and provided the means for the pursuit of the study of law in London. This, too, proved disastrous as Goldsmith made it only as far as Dublin where he was separated from his money by ruse or robbery. His poor mother, having become a widow with a large number of younger children, at this point could not support him as well, and so it was decided that a medical career was to become his road to solvency. He left for Edinburgh in 1752 and went on to Leyden in 1754. He traveled extensively on the Continent and managed to pick up a medical degree either in Louvain or Padua. He sustained himself during this period by playing the flute and participating in disputations for money. He reached London in 1756, where he was alternately employed as a journeyman to an apothecary and a doctor to the poor before becoming a popular literary figure. Oliver Goldsmith is best known for his literary achievements, particularly the play She Stoops to Conquer (1773) and his one novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766).

As was announced in the October 2009 edition of the newsletter, the NYAM Library has been awarded a New York State Discretionary Grant to conserve and preserve the Goldsmith Collection, an extraordinary cache of materials, a large portion of which consists of 112 editions of The Vicar of Wakefield in various languages, including an edition in shorthand. Dating from the first edition printed in 1766 to the 1929 limited edition with illustrations by Arthur Rackham, these books and one play provide both the scholar and the neophyte student a unique opportunity for the study of literary history as well as the history of the book.

Goldsmith's collected works, his collected essays, poems, miscellaneous works and his works on natural history and history complete the Library's small but significant collection. The Academy Fellows and librarians recognized the importance of the humanities, particularly artistic and literary works by and about physicians, for scholarly work in the history of medicine and developed the Library's collections accordingly via an aggressive acquisitions policy. They believed that an understanding of the cultural, social and historical milieu in which medical research and clinical medicine were conducted is essential for the proper study of the literature of medicine from the ancient Egyptians to the present day. Goldsmith was a notable 18th century literary figure, a member of an elite circle which included James Boswell and Samuel Johnson, and also a physician. His biography and books are integral to the Library's mission to provide a wide range of interrelated subjects in the history of medicine.

The possibility that Oliver Goldsmith may have died because he insisted upon being treated with a patent medicine, Dr. James's Powder, makes him even more interesting to NYAM and the Library's collections. From the time of its founding in 1847, NYAM sought not only to regulate the practice of medicine in the City of New York, but also to prevent the proliferation of patent remedies by vehemently opposing their distribution.

Goldsmith died on April 4th, 1774. A plaque in his honor was placed at Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey by his friends and colleagues. A Latin epitaph was written by his friend, Samuel Johnson and it begins as follows: A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian, Who left scarcely any style of writing untouched, And touched nothing that he did not adorn…