Joint Meeting of the METRO Science Librarians and Lib 2.0 SIGs today

Last spring I consulted with Linda Braun who coordinates the Special Interest Groups for METRO (Metropolitan New York Library Council) on how I can reinigorate my science librarians group after my last meeting had a disappointing turnout. She suggested that I have a joint meeting with the Library 2.0 group. This meeting was held today featuring Joe Murphy Science Librarian of Yale University who spoke about Social Networking Competencies for Librarians.

I was happy to see a turnout of about 35. There is also the old fashioned social networking of talking to people face to face. This is still extremely important in this Web 2.0 era. You really don't "know" a person until you have met him/her face to face. Even if you have exchanged hundreds of e-mails, instant messages, and tweets, your opinion of a person will often changed once you have met him/her. It was nice to reconnect with colleagues and meet new ones.

Notes from the meeting may be summarized at http://etherpad.com/METROsnlit

Joe's paper on this topic that was presented at the March 2009 ACRL meeting may be found at http://bit.ly/acrlpaper

The Powerpoint may be found at http://slideshare.net/joseph.murphy

8 people from the meeting had lunch at a nearby diner after the meeting.

Environmental Engineering Students were Attentive for a While

Every semester I teach a class to ENE 262, Introduction to Environmental Engineering. The students must work in teams to write a paper using peer review sources on a related topic. Some of the topics this term are:

• Carbon Footprints of Transportation Vehicles
• Nanoparticles in personal care products
• Sensors for water supply research
• State of the Art in landfilling

The professor had to be at a meeting in Trenton so he picked today for me to give the library lecture. I was afraid that the students would not be attentive and think that the class was not really necessary. I was pleasantly surprised for the first 50 minutes of the class, but toward the end I observed restlessness among the students. I picked a few of the topics and showed how they could be searched in Scopus and in the EPA database. My Powerpoint presentation may be found at http://library.njit.edu/docs/ENE262_Spring2009.ppt

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Remember Microfilm Reader Printers?

This afternoon I assisted a civil engineering graduate student find some old references. We had to order 3 from interlibrary and found 2 from the print collection. However, 3 articles that he needed were in journals that the NJIT library has in micoform only. So, I go up to the machine similar to the one above and saw that both plugs were out. Yes, it has been months since I had to refer someone to the microfilm machine. I always dread it since every patron has to be shown how to use this dinosaur. It turned out that the machine was out of toner. I was told by circulation supervisor that toner was ordered over the summer and she would have to check with the administrative assistant to see if it had arrived.

We retrieved the reels with the articles needed by the student. We told him if the toner cartridge had arrived a student worker would make the copies for him. If not we would order the articles through interlibrary loan. Yes, there are even low tech problems in libraries.

Meeting with the Biomedical Engineering Faculty

Implementing information literacy into the biomedical engineering (BME) curriculum at NJIT has always been a challenge. Until now I have just gotten my "15 minutes of fame" giving a short lecture in the Fundamentals of Engineering Design Course. This is given at the Freshman level when students are using mostly textbooks and would not need the technical journal literature in their field. This morning I had a meeting with a few of the faculty to try to determine where it could fit in. They felt students in BME 310 (biomedical computing) could get an assignment where they would need to find how a signal processing can be applied to a problem in biomedical engineering. They are having a full faculty meeting on Wednesday when they will discuss this.

NJIT Library Information Literacy Blog

Please check it out at http://blogs.njit.edu/infolit

Teaching Students How to Find Physical and Thermodynamic Properties of Chemical Substances

I taught this even during my early days at the NJIT Libraries. Back then I brought a book cart of the printed data compilations such as:

• The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics
• Langes Handbook
• JANAF Thermochemical Tables

As the years passed more resources became available on the web for free. I also say that for common substances there are usually several places where they can find the same information. Sometimes there is a conflict of values. Over the years I have compiled a web site with lists of resources where they may find physical and thermodynamic data. I even show how they may even by lucky and find properties of a substance by doing a Google search.

I give them an assignment based on what I cover in the lecture. Students are not allowed to use the Wikipedia. Every semester students seem to find one or more resources not familiar to me. I always say that there is more than one way to skin a cat when trying to find this type of information.

17th Anniversary at NJIT

It was 17 years ago today that I started at the NJIT Library. Within the month of September 1992 4 reference librarians, a director of reference, and a director of technical processing were hired. Let me explain this very unusual situation.

After a new University Librarian was hired in October 1991 almost the entire professional staff resigned within several months. From what I heard there was just not a match between the expectations of the University Librarian and the skills and values of the professional staff that she inherited.

At the same time the library moved to the Central Avenue Building. Back then I kept saying that it was like the blind leading the blind. Eventually we all became acclimated to the situation.

The two directors did not work out and left within two years. One reference librarian left after 5 years while the other three (including myself obviously) remain at NJIT. Two of us are still reference librarians while one moved on to University Web Services.

Helping out with the Research Roadmaps

The research roadmaps offered by the NJIT Library are described at http://library.njit.edu/researchhelpdesk/instruction/workshops.php . Today I did a workshop for IL 101 given to Freshman taking Humanities 101. The course description is as follows:

Focuses on developing written and oral communication skills; emphasizes writing expository and research essays; preparing oral reports; drafting, revising, editing; evaluation and proper documentation of source material; using rhetorical strategies such as narration and argument.

The librarians must reach over 900 students taking this course. The majority of the sections are taught by the liaison to the humanities and the information literacy specialist. Even though I prefer teaching classes in chemistry and related disciplines, I am willing to help out with this endeavor. I try to explain to students that learning how to use information resources is a gradual process. They learn the basics in this introductory course, but eventually must learn the specialized databases in their major. Hopefully the information literacy skills learned here are taken with them as they move to a graduate program and eventually into a business environment.

Chemical Abstracts Service Announces its 50 Millionth Substance

Here is an excerpt from the press release issued by Jim Corning:


"Columbus, Ohio (September 8, 2009) – Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), a division of the American Chemical Society, announced that on September 7 it recorded the 50 millionth substance in CAS REGISTRY, the world’s most comprehensive and high-quality compendium of publicly disclosed chemical information. The recently registered substance is a novel arylmethylidene heterocycle with analgesic properties. Reaching the 50 million mark so quickly is an indicator of the accelerating pace of scientific knowledge. CAS registered the 40 millionth substance just nine months ago—in contrast, it took 33 years for CAS to register the 10 millionth compound in 1990."

The complete press release may be found at
http://www.cas.org/newsevents/releases/50millionth090809.html

For an up to date count users may consult http://www.cas.org/cgi-bin/cas/regreport.pl

Most substances (80%?) have appeared in the literature only once.

My Powerpoints are on Slideshare

I found out about a service called Slideshare where a person can mount his/her Powerpoint presentations to allow others to use them. My 6 files are available at http://www.slideshare.net/bruceslutsky . It states how many times each Powerpoint has been viewed. I was surprised to see that my lesson on how to find information in civil and environmental engineering was viewed 46 times in 5 days, more than the chemistry related files.

Presentation to Chemical Engineering Graduate Students Yesterday

I gave a presentation to CHE 794 yesterday. Below is a description of the course from the NJIT course catalog:

ChE 794 - Professional Presentations for Ph.D. Students (0 credits)Intended to help students make better technical presentations. Each student is required to make a presentation on a research topic; guest lectures will occur during the semester. Effective From: Fall 2007

Professor Boris Khusid asked me to talk about how I use Powerpoint in my work. I gave a brief introduction on how Powerpoint can be used effectively and that it should assist the speaker and not be a distraction. I then described the 4 Powerpoints that I use at NJIT to teach chemistry/chemical engineering students to find information from print and electronic sources:

1. General Introduction
2. How to Find Physical Property Data
3. Chemical Abstracts and Scifinder Scholar
4. Scopus and other resources

My training has to be very cursory. I also invite students to come to me in the future if they need assistance in finding information. They did seem to be attentive, but nobody asked questions. Under these circumstances it is impossible to assess the impact of the lecture. I don't expect students to become chemical information specialists, but just to be aware of the resources in their field that are available now and in the future when they move on to another academic program or to industry.

Started Using Slideshare today

I recently became aware of the program Slideshare. I am in the process of uploading the Powerpoint Presentations I've developed at NJIT so I can more easily share them with my colleagues.

It seems that students only want online resources

This morning I went onto QANDANJ and received a question from a Rutgers student. She had given me 2 incomplete citations and wanted an online source for them. It took me a little time to determine that they were both book chapters from books that Rutgers had only in print format. She seemed very disappointed that the sources were not available online. I have had some discussions with faculty who say that today's students do not want to read. I guess that's the way it is with today's students.

Working on the late shift

Once the academic year begins we work one day a week from 1 PM to 8 PM. The librarian on the late shift must be at the reference desk from 5 PM - 8 PM. The first hour is usually busy since the day students are still here while the evening students are arriving and often visit the library before class. From 6 PM - 8 PM there are few transactions at the desk since students are in class until 9 PM. The main advantage of working late is avoiding the rush hour crowds on the trains. The disadvantage is getting home late and waking up early the next morning.