Some Recent Chat Reference Questions

As my schedule permits I participate in QANANJ, a statewide chat service. I also monitor the national academic queue. Some of the questions are challenging while others are quite mundane and even silly. Here is a sample of recent questions that I have done:

Chat Transcript: I am doing a research project for my LIBS 100 college class. I already have looked at the Occupational Office Outlook Handbook for information on a career as a nurse. Where else might I go to find information on Nursing careers?


Chat Transcript: Do you have a list of the Nielsen ratings for television for the year 1967 ?


Chat Transcript: facts about spitting cobras

Reference Question of the Day

A student was looking for the Infrared and Raman spectra of BaTiO3. It was Scifinder Scholar to the rescue. A did a substance search and found a direct link to the IR spectrum. There was a link to a research paper which had the Ram Spectrum. I think back to how hard it would be to find this information all those years ago when I was a chemistry student.

Lunch with two Rutgers Colleagues

Today I had lunch with Ann Watkins and Ella Hu of the Rutgers Library Faculty. I've had the pleasure of knowing Ann since I first started at NJIT in 1992. Ella was recently appointed Chemistry and Physical Sciences Librarian at the Central New Jersey campus of Rutgers. We had an enjoyable time discussing professional issues.

Kudos to Chemical Abstracts Service

This is very unlike me, but at the last minute I remembered that I was scheduled to give a talk to chemical engineering graduate students on the new version of Scifinder Scholar. At 11:30 AM I phone Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) to ask for temporary training passwords. I spoke to a Ms. Evans who promptly took care of this matter. Within an hour I received the temporary passwords. I gave the lecture at 2:45. I spoke briefly about the history of CAS and how the print version evolved into the web version of Scifinder over a period of years. I demonstrated some searches using my account and showed how students should open their accounts. At the end I passed out the temporary passwords so students could do their own searches. Alls well that ends well.

Information seeking skills of high school students in chemistry

Here is an e-mail that I sent to a high school chemistry teach whom I know through the New Jersey Chemistry Olympics:

I have an idea for a project not related to the New Jersey Chemistry Olympics. What information seeking skills do high school science students use? Do they just Google or are they aware of the multitude of free and fee based databases with scientific information. I am willing to work on a project with high school teachers to train students how to search for scientific and technical information. Whom may I contact about this proposal?

Here is the response I received:

This sounds like a great idea.

From what I've seen, I believe that the search skills of students and teachers are basically limited to Google. Even with Google, teachers and students don't really understand the how to conduct a search. So often I am told that teachers teach them to search for the chemical formula of what by typing: "what is the chemical formula of water" with the quotes in place!!!! Not everyone of course. Probably a minority -- but a large minority teach students this.

So, if you have a plan -- go for it. It's sorely needed.

Everybody justloves to Google.

The Man with the Green Jacket is Absent on St. Patrick's Day

Every year NJIT University Librarian Richard Sweeney wears his green jacket to work on St. Patrick's Day. No, Rich did not win the Master's Golf Tournament, but he has a green jacket similar to the one above that has been in his family for a couple of generations. Since he is away today at a professional meeting the NJIT library staff will have to settle for seeing pictures of the green jacket.

Met with Mark Winston of the Rutgers - Newark Dana Library

This morning I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Mark Winston, the new Director of the John Cotton Dana Library of Rutgers-Newark. He also serves as Assistant Chancellor at that campus. I discussed the METRO Science Librarians SIG and invited him to speak at a future meeting. In 2001 he wrote a paper describing the demographics of academic science librarians. He has also written about leaderships skills among librarians. He will get back to me in a few days on his availabilty to speak to the group. We also discussed developing closer collaborative relationships between the Van Houten and Dana reference staffs.

Why is the Third Week in March the Spring Break week?

Since I have worked at NJIT, the third week in March has been the Spring break week. Wouldn't it make more sense for the Easter-Passover week which is usually in April to have no classes? I remember all those years ago when I was a student that was the situation.

Even Professors Google Away

Yesterday I helped a colleague teach a class on how to use EndNote to graduate students and faculty. A professor in environmental science came in a few minutes early and was seen researching a topic using Google. I asked him why he was searching Google and not one of the bibliographic databases. He asnswered saying that he had too many hits when he searched Scopus. I offered to help him after the session. I executed the search in Scopus and showed him how to sort by relevance. He also wanted only research done in the USA. I also showed him how to use the affiliation field from the drop down menu to limted the results. He seemed to be satisfied.

Meeting with a consultant "on the fly"

Last October a meeting that I had with a consultant to the new pharmaceutical chemistry department was panned weeks in advance. This afternoon, I walked through the halls of Tiernan Hall hoping to drum up some business for my reference services. At times I encounter students and faculty who need my help when I just pass by. I was near the Chemical Engineering Departmental office when two professors called me in. They were meeting with Professor Antonio Moreira of UMBC, a consultant to the new program in bioprocess engineering. They wanted me to talk to him about the library services. We walked over to the library where I described the book and journal collections in areas related to his specialty. Everything seemed to work out even though this was an impromptu meeting.

Students Seeking Physical Property Data still Google Away

Yesterday the instructor of Math 225 returned the students' assignments to me where there are asked to find physical properties of chemical substances. In my lecture I provide a list of sources where this information may be found (http://library.njit.edu/researchhelpdesk/subjectguides/phys-prop.php) The answers to the questions may be found in the sources listed there. I explain to students that there is "always more than one way to skin a cat" in finding data for well known substances. When I evaluate their answers, I often find reliable sources that the students used to get the information. Very often chemical companies provide data for the chemicals that they sell. It seems obvious that they find it by using our friend Google. One student used the Wikipedia which was forbidden. a few other people found "Wikipedia clones" where it was obvious that the data was taken from one source and placed on another one.

We received evidence that Information Literacy has succeeded at NJIT

We received this e-mail from the Director of Reference:

This morning,[Humanities Professor] Norbert Elliot sent us the preliminary statistical analysis of our information literacy assessment for the Fall 2008 cohort of writing students.The results are impressive –showing that our revised curriculum and Roadmaps intervention seems to be having a positive effect on student performance. Professor Elliot wrote:

“In each case, the IL scores were higher after the introduction of your Research Roadmap than before that instruction was introduced. “

This is certainly a team effort, but most of the kudos must go to the Director of Reference and Information Literacy Librarian who did most of the teaching in Fall 2008. I did teach some of the classes in the humanities, but my expertise is in training students to use information resources in chemistry and related disciplines. Hopefully, the engineering students who took the required writing courses will retain their information literacy skills and use them when they take courses in their respective majors.

METRO Science Librarians SIG Meeting Today

The meeting was scheduled to begin at 1:30 PM, but I invited people to meet me for lunch before. Robert Olley of the Wildlife Conservation Society and David Brodherson of Baruch College joined me for lunch at a local diner. We had a good discussion of various professional issues. Here was the agenda:


Robert Olley - Conducting Academic Research in the Fields of Zoology and Conservation

Jill Cirasella - Quirky, Not Quacky: Quantum Computing For Librarians
Valerie Tucci and Naveen Maddali - Future of A&I services and Scitopia

The three talks were excellent. When I return to work on Monday, I will have to check out Scitopia. It seems to be a good federated search engine.

The Reference Desk IS a dinosaur

People acquainted with me know that I am the convener of the METRO Science Librarians SIG. A few years ago I held a meeting to discuss management issues in science libraries. One statement made by David Stern (formerly with Yale University now with Brown University) was "The Reference Desk is a Dinosaur." There is both anecdotal and empirical data to support that.

I came to the desk at 5:00 PM and as of now (5:47 PM) one person asked for a pencil while a second just asked about photocopies. I hit bottom a few weeks ago when a student approached the desk and I ask "May I help you?" He answered "no, that's OK, I just want to put something in the garbage pail. This experience is typical these days.

A recent paper in Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship provide hard data that supports that there is no longer a need to have a professional librarian at a reference desk at all times any longer. The article states that 58% of all questions may be answered in less than 1 minute while 94% are answered in less than 5 minutes. It went on to say that 69% of all questions may be answered by a student worker while another 27% may be done by a reference generalist.

I think the problem is that upper managers who don't work at the reference desk cannot understand the frustration of reference librarians. In an informal discussion with a colleague I suggested that if one of the reference librarians leaves, he/she should be replaced by an information assistant who would refer difficult questions to subject specialist librarian.