Erie County Medical Center / W Yerby Jones Memorial Library

Description

Established in 1921, when the institution was originally named the Buffalo City Hospital, the Library is a vigorous information access center serving the Erie County Medical Center’s goals in patient care, education, and research.

The purpose of the Library is to meet the knowledge-based needs of ECMC health science professionals and its administrative and technical staff members, including those of the Erie County Home and Infirmary and Erie County Laboratories, to learn and dynamically create, combine, and retrieve information.

Students of the University at Buffalo Schools of Medicine, Dentistry, Pharmacy, and Health-Related Professions are extended full privileges while assigned to ECMC during their clinical affiliation.

Non-affiliated health science professionals and students are welcome to use the Library, but do not have borrowing or interlibrary loan privileges.

Conveniently located on the ground floor in Room G-60, adjacent to the Medical Staff and employee entrances and the elevators to the clinic and patient care areas, the Library has 4,900 square feet of floor space.

The general reading room seats 54 patrons amid 3,150 feet of shelving. It contains over 18,000 journal volumes. It receives more than 2,700 current health sciences and scientific journals in print and/or electronic format. It has more than 2,000 book titles in the basic and clinical sciences in its reference collection. The Library offers 12 general-use ECMC networked computers with USB and DVD / CD drives, 5 laptop computers, and Free Wireless access. The photocopier and computer printers are available on a free, limited (50 pages per person, per day) but generous basis.

Standards in material selection are anchored upon the quotation from Seneca:

“Libros non refert quam multos sed quam bonos habeas.”

(“It is not important how many books you have, but rather how good they are.”)

Consequently, the Library purchases, on average, more than 300 titles per year to maintain the most recent editions in its book collection.

W. Yerby Jones, MD, (1904 – 1979) was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and moved to Buffalo as a teenager with his family. His mother was a teacher in the Buffalo School system and his father was a teamster. The third black graduate of the Univesity at Buffalo medical school, class of 1924, he completed graduate work at Cleveland Clinic and Columbia University, interned in St. Louis, and began practicing medicine in Buffalo in 1931, specializing in ophthalmology in 1934. Buffalo’s first Black physician to be accredited as a specialist. The Urban League Award recipient in 1949, Dr. Jones was cited for occupational and professional achievement as the lone black physician on the UB faculty and one of only 14 black physicians to be admitted to membership in the American College of Surgeons. Chief of Ophthalmology at the E.J. Meyer Memorial Hospital (formerly the Buffalo City Hospital) for more than 30 years, he was president of the medical staff, 1964-1972, and retired in 1971 Emeritus as UB clinical professor of surgery (ophthalmology). The Library was dedicated to his memory in 1979.