Levy Library Blog

Massive Open Online Courses, also known as MOOCS, are high-quality online courses on a variety of topics, open to all.  These are available to members of the Mount Sinai community and the public at no cost.   In addition to the traditional course materials such as videos, readings and problem sets, MOOCs provide interactive user forums that help build a community for students.

Three of the top MOOCs available include the following:

1.)    The Icahn School of Medicine is participating in the Coursera initiative which is very popular and offers certificates in select programs.  View the Coursera courses offered by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai here.

2.)   Harvard & MIT’s EdX is also a terrific learning resource.

3.)    The KHAN Academy is a very popular initiative and has a finance focus.

If you have any specific questions, please contact John Graves, Director of Instructional Technology.

For the last two weeks, some library users have experienced an error when trying to connect to library resources from off-campus.  We apologize for this error.   The connection problem has now been resolved on the server side, however once someone has seen the error, they will continue to have the problem until they have cleared all browser history information including cookies, browser cache, saved forms and saved library passwords.  Here are the instructions:

Firefox:

• Click on History
• Click on Clear Recent History
• This pops open a window.
• Change the dropdown from Last Hour to Everything
• Expand the Details menu
• Check ALL of the boxes
• Click Clear Now
• Restart the browser

IE:

• Click on Safety
• Click on Delete Browsing History
• Uncheck the Preserve Favorites box
• Check all boxes
• Click Delete
• Restart browser

Chrome:

• Click on the 3 horizontal lines at the end of the URL bar
• Click History
• Click Clear Browsing Data
• Make sure the dropdown for timeframe says The Beginning of Time
• Check all the boxes
• Click Clear Browsing Data

Safari (on a MAC)

• Click Reset Safari
• Check all boxes
• Click Reset
• Quit out of the browser
• Restart

We regret the inconvenience this has caused to our users.  Please contact us if you have any questions or problems: http://library.mssm.edu/services/askus.shtml

With World War I going on and the Influenza Epidemic of 1918 raging, The Mount Sinai Hospital Board of Trustees found it prudent to agree to the Medical Board’s request to allow women to serve as blood donors. This was a transitional period in transfusion medicine when indirect transfusion existed (what we are familiar with today), but when direct transfusion – donor to recipient, lying side by side – was still being used.  Mount Sinai physicians Lester Unger, MD and Richard Lewisohn, MD made contributions to both methods just a few years before this.  But it was Lewisohn’s citrate method allowing for indirect transfusions that won the day and paved the way for the development of modern blood banking.

Leading journals Nature and BMJ are now offering an article metrics feature to analyze the social media impact of an article.  Tweets, blog posts, Facebook shares, news stories, Google+ mentions, page views, and citations from articles are all tabulated and displayed for each article in a graph, shown below.

Click on Article Metrics for most Nature or BMJ articles to view this data.  Altmetrics has been defined as the creation and study of new metrics based on the Social Web for analyzing and informing scholarship.  Altmetrics is beginning to be seen as a supplement to peer-review, as online conversations, shares, and bookmarks can be tabulated by the day or week, rather than the slower journal publication cycle.  Read more about altmetrics here.