Category Archives: About the Library

Coming Soon This Fall: MSK Library Reopening

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March 19, 2020 marked the day when the MSK Library closed its doors to our user community. While the physical space could not be accessed, this didn’t mean we were not available to support information requests from clients based at any location.  The moment we closed, our focus was on promoting and showcasing the Library’s digital resources and virtual services.

The Library will be part of the Reactivation: Phase B plan and we anticipate opening the Library to MSK staff in early October two days per week. In drafting plans to reopen, our goal is to work with leadership and internal departments to consider how best to balance the safety of the library team and our clients. Our reopening will include social distancing measures, clearly identifying seating arrangements for users, and an effective cleaning regime.

As a friendly reminder, the MSK user community, and our patients and their caregivers can continue to reach out to us via chat, phone, email, or by using one of the request forms on our ASK US web page.

As our reopening plan evolves, we will be posting important information on our Website and our social media platforms (internal and external).  Questions or comments can be directed to my attention — don’t hesitate to contact me!

Donna Gibson
Director of Library Services

A Document Delivery Milestone: 400,000 ILLiad Requests

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We’re celebrating a milestone here on the library team; the counter has tipped from 399,999 to 400,000 requests in ILLiad. This means that since 2009, the ILL team at the MSK Medical Library has processed 400k requests for books, articles, standards, dissertations, meeting abstracts, conference papers, tables of contents, and more for researchers at MSK and on the flip side, for libraries all over the world who request items from our collection.

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We’ve learned some tricks here and there to fill these requests. One blog [now defunct] referred to our specialization as Forensic Bibliographic Reconstruction and I, for one, take that as a huge compliment. Most requests come to us replete with all the fields filled, others take more research. I’ve seen requests for “The Smith Article from last week” or “Not sure.” Sometimes it can be more of a scavenger hunt or a wild goose chase. We usually get the article in the user’s hands.

We provide this service at no cost to the user, anyone with an MSK email and ID number, and as long as it’s relevant to work done at MSK. We’ve processed requests for physics, psychology, nutrition, medicine, physical therapy, chemistry, administration, HR, etc. But sometimes there are things we just can’t get.

With libraries around the world currently shut down or in various stages of quarantine, getting articles to users has been trickier. We are learning just how many items are only available from the shelves of shuttered libraries. The partnerships and channels of interlibrary loan have become more important than ever.    

I’m happy to use this opportunity to announce that ILLiad will soon be getting a new look! The webpages are being redesigned to be easier to use, especially on mobile devices. We’re currently working to make ordering and receiving articles easier for our user community. More details will follow in the coming weeks.

If you’d like to know more about our service or place a request, visit us at https://illiad.mskcc.org/illiad/Logon.html. We’re happy to answer any questions at ill@mskcc.org.

Kudos From Our Community

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We love sharing positive feedback we receive from the MSK community and beyond thanking us for our services. Here is a selection of kudos we’ve received over the last few weeks:

“Many thanks for sending these highly relevant papers and this absolutely fantastic search. This is so incredibly helpful and I am so grateful. The 3 papers you’ve included are directly relevant and so interesting. I really liked the first scale. Many thanks again for the fantastic Library service.”
Service: Literature Search

“Thank you so much for your exceptional service. It’s reassuring when I see that one of our requests is routed to your facility, because I know that rare is the time that you won’t come through for us. We appreciate you!”
Service: Document Delivery 

“I love librarians!!! Super smart people! Thank you for your time.”
 
 
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