Library News

We're pleased to announce that the Waldmann Dental Library located at the Manhattan VA is now open for business. As the VA gets back on its feet our hours are shortened as follows:

• Card Swipe Access:  Mon-Fri 7:30am - 8:00pm
• Staffed:  Mon-Fri 8:00am - 8:00pm
• By order of VA Security, you must VACATE the building by 8:00pm. Thanks for your cooperation.

Medical students may use the Waldmann Dental Library as alternate study space. Those without activated purple NYU IDs will be limited to the hours the facility is staffed.

The stairwell door on the second floor is currently locked. In spite of what the signs say, you may use the public elevators to get to the second floor.

Two new printers have been installed and are available to account holders for printing from the computers in the library. For now we cannot offer printing from your own personal computer or laptop.

What's happening with the library?

If you've walked from the Medical Center lobby east through the breezeway toward the Smilow Building, you may have noticed that the library facility is closed. I want to reassure you that planning is underway to reopen the Ehrman Medical Library, once Medical Science Building systems are restored. No date has yet been set for that.

You may not know that the NYU Health Sciences Libraries include 5 separate locations, bridging schools and colleges (Medicine and Dentistry), institutions (NYU and Bellevue Hospital Center), hospitals (Tisch and HJD), and even a location out of the city (Institute for Environmental Medicine at Sterling Forest, NY). Damage from Superstorm Sandy forced the closure of our 3 largest and busiest locations: the Ehrman Medical Library in the MSB, the Bellevue Medical Library, and the Waldmann Dental Library in the Manhattan VA Hospital. The Bellevue Medical Library reopened recently, with the reopening of Bellevue Hospital in mid-February. The Waldmann Dental Library will reopen when the VA Hospital opens its doors once again, sometime in March.

With all of these issues with our facilities, you may be wondering what library faculty and staff are doing? Since late December, most of the faculty and staff have been located in temporary offices at 577 First Avenue, across from the hospital. This temporary location has not impeded the work of the library faculty – they're out in classrooms, labs, offices, and patient wards, actively working to identify and meet the information needs of students, trainees, researchers, and care providers. This reflects two truths about modern research libraries in general and our library in particular: 1) virtually all of the knowledge resources and services we offer are digital and 2) our library faculty do not sit behind a reference desk waiting for questions to come to them.

Increasingly, librarians are embedded in the workflow of the people they support and are active partners in solving information problems. Because of this, the value of the library, like that of library faculty, is embedded in the fabric of education, research, and patient care. The knowledge resources, services, and tools that the library delivers are at the network level and not dependent on a physical location. Nevertheless, like many of our users, we too look forward to welcoming you back to a renovated facility that is designed to facilitate discovery and reflection. 

Neil Rambo

Director, Health Sciences Libraries and Knowledge Informatics

There are currently 8 different locations with available study space in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Sterling Forest. For a detailed list of locations, please see our map!  Visit our website for updates and access to resources, services, and collections.

View NYU Student Study Space in a larger map

The Ehrman Medical Library sustained considerable damage to its physical facility and IT infrastructure from Hurricane Sandy. We lost most of our staff work areas, our student study space, and almost all of the onsite print collection, to floodwaters. The area is still inaccessible and as such the Ehrman Medical Library remains closed until further notice.

Bellevue Hospital and the Manhattan VA Hospital were also damaged during the storm and remain closed. Therefore, the Bellevue Medical Library and the Waldmann Dental Library (located in the VA Hospital) are also closed until further notice. The Environmental Medicine Library at Sterling Forest is expected to regain power and connectivity, and be open, the week of Nov. 12. The Robbins Medical Library at the Hospital for Joint Diseases remains open.

We ask for your patience and understanding as the NYU Health Sciences Libraries, together with the greater NYU Langone Medical Center community, embarks on a prolonged recovery effort. Our top priority is now, as it always has been, to provide the NYULMC community with the highest quality knowledge resources to support the missions of patient care, research, and education. To this end, we have been working around the clock to get our online resources and services functioning as usual, and we are pleased to report that this rebuilding effort is mostly complete. You can help by alerting us to any links that appear to be broken or not working as expected.

Our Request-an-Article service has been restored and our librarians can again be contacted via the Ask-a-Librarian form or web chat. We ask for your patience should you encounter any bumps along the way, or if things take a little longer than usual — we are working remotely or in temporary locations and conditions are changing every day.

In the weeks and months ahead, we will be redesigning and rebuilding our online services and digital library presence. We will also accelerate planning for a much improved and state-of-the-art library facility. We will come back better than ever, and we'll be more than ready to serve our community as it emerges from an extraordinary time. We are proud to be a part of NYULMC

 The faculty and staff of the NYU Health Sciences Libraries thank you for your support!