Time for a Staycation

Everyone including me needs time away from their job.  I have 20 vacation and 3 personal days that I must take each year, so I usually take most of them during the summer when library business is slow.  I usually take time off in late May after the Chemistry Olympics, but this year we were told we had to work on the inventory project.  So I will be taking off the first week in June this year just to stay at home and home and take it easy.  I guess we can call this “staycation”.

I will not look at my work e-mail during this time.  Actually my e-mail account will be transitioned from Outlook to Webmail by Google when I am out.  NJIT is doing this to standardized all e-mail accounts of students, faculty and staff.  Webmail by Google has a capacity of 25 GB while the Outlook system can only handle 1 GB per account.  There will obviously be a learning curve while transitioning to the new system.

Inventory Project at the NJIT Library

For the first time in 11 years the NJIT Library inventoried the circulating and reference collections.  We are doing this in preparation for the move to a statewide catalog of the holdings of VALE libraries.  The task of shelf-reading and manually determining the missing books fell to an outside organization.  The  library staff changed the holdings records for the books that were determined to be missing.  If they are still missing months from now, the cataloging and OCLC records will be purged.  It is inevitable in any library that books will be stolen or lost.  I observed that the "inventory shrinkage" was minimal.

Libraries are moving away from their role of being a depository for printed resources.  Thus, this will likely be the last inventory done by the NJIT Library.

Another Semester Comes to an End

Another semester is coming to a close as I approach 21 years at NJIT.  Thus I am completing my 42 semester as I see retirement coming around the bend.  It may be 4 years away as there are certain benefits available when someone completes 25 years as a New Jersey state employee. 

As I have reported several times in this journal the number of reference transactions continue to decline.  For must hours either the circulation staff or a patron will ring a doorbell and the librarian on duty will immediately come out to provide assistance.  I am hoping that in the near future we can make the circulation desk the single service point in the library which has been done in many places.

We will have a new librarian joining the reference staff next week.  He seems very energetic and eager to learn, but any new job is an adjustment for the new hire.

Regular readers of this blog (if there are any left J) must note that my output here has declined tremendously.  I guess I am just running out of ideas.  Google Analytics indicates that I get about one hit a day on the average.  My personal journal has all of the fun stuff.

Until next time.

Learning about InChi - the worldwide chemical structure identifier standard

Years ago when I worked in a pharmaceutical company as an information scientist I had to keep abreast of developments in chemical searching since the major part of my job was to search the chemical literature for documentation of new substances.  In my role as Technical Reference Librarian at NJIT I am much more of a generalist since I teach students how to find information in a wide variety of disciplines.  Very often I hear of a tool or service, but I am only familiar with it in a very cursory way.  I heard of InChI, but I didn’t know any of the details of it.  Yesterday there was an e-mail on the CHMINF-L listserv by David Evans of Reed Elsevier demonstrating videos released by the InChI Trust.  I looked at the videos which were useful but cursory and somehow was motivated to research this topic further.

I did the obvious and did a Google search on InChi and found several useful sites describing the worldwide chemical structure identifier standard:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Chemical_Identifier - this Wikipedia entry is reliable

http://www.inchi-trust.org/ - InChI Trust Web Site

http://www.inchi-trust.org/fileadmin/user_upload/html/inchifaq/inchi-faq.html - The InChI FAQ

These web sites gave me enough information on this topic, but I felt I had to read a few peer reviewed papers:

InChI - the worldwide chemical structure identifier standard

By Heller, Stephen; McNaught, Alan; Stein, Stephen; Tchekhovskoi, Dmitrii; Pletnev, Igor

From Journal of Cheminformatics (2013), 5, 7. Language: English, Database: CAPLUS, DOI:10.1186/1758-2946-5-7

InChI in the wild: an assessment of InChIKey searching in Google

By Southan, Christopher

From Journal of Cheminformatics (2013), 5, 10. Language: English, Database: CAPLUS, DOI:10.1186/1758-2946-5-10

At this point I was ready to apply what I learned.  I was able to use Pub Med and ChemSpider to find out the InChI and InChIKey for several molecules.  I found out how to use InChI  and InChIKey to search for  molecules in Scifinder.  There are ways to translate a structure into InChI and the other way around.

I really want to hone my skills in searching for structures.  I also downloaded structure drawing programs from ACD Labs and Accelyrs.

April 14-20 is National Library Week

 Caroline Kennedy is seen above promoting National Library Week.  It seems that few academic libraries are involved in this endeavor.  We should use it to promote reference services to our students.

My Opinion on Faculty Rank for Librarians

Certainly much has been written in the library literature over the years on the issue of faculty rank and status for librarians.  A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled As Their Roles Change, Some Librarians Lose Faculty Status, by Sydni Dunn prompts me to make comments on this issue.  The article states that at the University of Virginia future librarians will be classified as university staff while current employees will retain faculty status.

The advantage of faculty status is that after a librarian has attained tenure he/she has job security.  Those librarians feel “more professional” than their colleagues who are staff.  On the other hand going through the tenure process creates anxiety.  The tenure requirements vary at different universities.  At some colleges publications demonstrating empirical research are required for tenure. While at other universities publications are helpful but job performance and professional activities are used in the evaluation for tenure.

Since I have been exposed to both situations, I am commenting based on my experiences.  Here at NJIT we have professional status.  Our raises are determined though job performance.  Activity in professional organizations and publishing are encouraged, but are not absolute requirements for the job.  After six years we are granted “Contractual Expectation” which I define as “quasi tenure.”  We can only be terminated for documented misconduct or poor performance.

I prefer the “professional staff” status since I feel that the tenure process creates so much tension.  I have observed many tenure track librarians spending much time going to professional meetings.  This takes time away from helping library patrons.  Tenure track librarians are often allowed release time to do their research.  Thus less time is spent helping their students.  In my opinion much of the library literature is very self-serving.  I read many papers and feel that they just don’t prove anything.

The article in the Chronicle states that a survey done by Lisa Hinchliffe at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign states that nearly two-thirds of the 1600 institutions that responded have faculty status.  36% have tenure or on the tenure track while 28% have faculty status but are off the tenure track.  The remaining third don’t have faculty rank or status.

I guess this issue can be debated indefinitely.

Remembering My Mentor Vitaut Kipel

I had a crazy dream last night about Dr. Vitaut Kipel who was my first supervisor at the New York Public Library Science and Technology Division when I was hired in February 1983.  He really mentored me as he always gave me challenging assignments.  I enjoyed writing annotations for New Technical Books, a publication of the division. It was so frustrating giving reference service in a closed stack library with the collection in several places. Dr. Kipel retired as Assistant Chief of the Division in early 1985.  The last time I saw him was in Spring 1988 shortly after my son Lee was born.

Often I am curious about what happened to people who have influenced me many years after our paths diverged.  Kipel was scholar of Belarusan culture and wrote the following book:

Kipelʹ, Vitaŭt. Belarusans in the United States. Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 1999. Print.

His personal papers about Belarusan immigration are housed at the University of Minnesota.  This site http://www.ihrc.umn.edu/research/vitrage/all/ka/ihrc1210.html is a finding aid for his papers and offers a detailed biography.

Dr. Kipel is now 85 years old and as far as I know he is still living in East Rutherford, NJ.  I am aware that his wife Zora (seen in the photo above) who also worked for NYPL passed away in 2003.  I still have the fondest memories of Vitaut Kipel.