Cited Reference Searches are So Tedious

We routinely do cited reference searches to support candidates for promotion and/or tenure. At times faculty members ask for such searches to see how their totals change from year to year. They are usually interested in their H index which has been discussed in this blog.

I don't mind doing these searches, but they are quite tedious. We use the Web of Science, Scifinder Scholar and Scopus to determine reference counts. These three indexing services cover different publications over inconsistant time frames. We give the professor the benefit of the doubt and report the highest number among the three databases. It takes a long time to accurately perform a cited reference search for a prolific researcher.

Passing of a Former Colleague

Today I received an e-mail from my boss Richard Sweeney informing the NJIT Library staff of the untimely passing of Jamie McGuiness in the summer of 2007. He found out about it from a September 2008 post of the blog of the Southern California Chapter of the Special Libraries Association.

I fondly remember how enthusiastic Jamie was when she worked here from September 1996 until March 1997. She actually traveled to New Jersey from North Carolina to be interviewed for a temporary position. Before her interview, she made a trip to the NC State library to examine their science and engineering collections. She tried very hard to learn to use the technical resources available at NJIT even though her educational background was in the humanities. I have known many librarians who panic when confronted with reference questions in technical disciplines (especially chemistry). Jamie made it her business to attend my lectures teaching students to use information resources in chemistry and related disciplines. She was able to use her experience at NJIT to land her next position at the University of Missouri at Rolla (UMR).

When people leave professional positions, they usually keep in touch for a short period of time after their departure, but eventually move on and let go. I knew that she worked for several years at UMR, but I didn't know that she later became Library Director at the Art Institute of California’s San Francisco campus.

I was saddened to hear today (2 1/2 years later) of her untimely passing. The library at the Art Institute is now known as the Jamie A. McGuiness Memorial Library. That is quite a tribute.

Are Students Afraid to Ask Questions During Lectures?

This morning I taught my standard lecture on how to find information in chemistry and chemical engineering to ChE 396. Throughout my talk I asked if there are any questions. There were none as usual. As I was walking back to the library I encountered a student from the class who said "May I asked you a question?" He asked if the Ebsco family of databases can be used to find cost related information relating to chemical processes. I said that Business Source Premier would be a good source.

This was a good questions, but apparently the student was afraid to ask it during the class.

Textbook Questions Again

At the beginning of each semester I write a journal entry about students who ask about textbooks. What is disappointing is that returning students do not know to check the library's catalog to see if we have them. This afternoon during my shift at QANDANJ I answered three such questions from a student at Northeastern University.

Sometimes when students don't find what they want, they consult with a librarian to make sure they searched the catalog correctly. Sometimes students say they ordered the book online, but didn't receive it yet.

Reference Question from this Blog

I use Google Analytics to determine the number of times some accesses this blog each day. I can even determine the location of the visitors, which entries were viewed, and how long the visitor stayed on the site. I can't at all observe if the entry had any impact on the person reading it. I received the following reference question via e-mail today.

I found your blog post about having helped out with the 2009 New Jersey state Chemistry Olympics, and I thought you'd be the perfect person to answer a quick question I've had. I'm writing a college recommendation for a student from XXXXX High School who claims to have won a Platinum Crucible award from the American Chemical Society. Do you know what this award might be, and how it's judged? Because I couldn't verify the existence of the award online, I contacted the ACS (at both the national and local levels) for more information. Mostly, people have been mystified, so I'd prefer not to ask the student for more information (in case the award doesn't exist). One person today, however, told me that it could be a purely local award, say for a poster contest, or else it could be an award given to a winning team (and not to an individual). So I'm wondering if this award rings a bell to you, as someone who participated in last year's Olympics.

I told the person that there was no award named "Platium Crucible" awarded at the New Jersey Chemistry Olympics. I searched the following sources to try to find an answer:

Google
Chemical Abstracts
Business Source Premier – this covers some trade magazines in chemistry including the Chemical & Engineering News
The American Chemical Society Publications site
The Journal of Chemical Education

I could not find any references to a Platinum Crucible Award.

The closest thing that I found was that the newsletter for the Pittsburgh local section of the ACS is called the Crucible. It may be possible that the Pittsburgh section gave out such an award, but I have no evidence of that.

Classes Resume at NJIT - There are Some "Eager Beavers"

The Spring 2010 semester began at NJIT today. It's nice to see some enthusiastic students ("eager beavers") on the first day of class. On the other hand, there will always be procastinators. When I took the reference desk at 10 AM several students asked questions about an ASTM Standard which was assigned to them in a mechanical engineering class.

There was a line out the door for the college bookstore when I past it during my lunch hour. I didn't get any reference questions about text books, yet at least, but they will be coming.

Joint Meet of Downstate and Upstate Librarians Announced

The next meeting of the METRO Science Librarians SIG will be Wednesday February 10th at 1 PM at METRO Headquarters:

57 East 11th Street 4th Floor
New York, NY

The theme will be Trends in Sci/Tech and Medical Publishing. The Panelists will be

Kris Fitzpatrick – IEEE
Allan Barnett – Institute of Physics Publishing
Elizabeth Perill – Elsevier

We will be joined by our colleagues from the Upstate New York Science Librarians Group http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/unysci/ny-science-lib.html who will be attending through web conferencing. Since there is a limited number of seats, I would prefer that downstate people come in person, but if there are seats available, NYC area librarians may attend the web conference. Please RSVP by February 1 and indicate if you will come in person or online. I will give the instructions on how to access the web conference on or about February 3. Please feel free to contact me if there any questions.

The web conference will begin promptly at 1:30 PM

I can be reached at Bruce.Slutsky@njit.edu or 973-642-4950

VALE Meeting on Friday January 8th

Theme of the VALE annual conference:

The Future Is Now: Meeting the Needs of Our Users

Busch Campus Center

Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ

For those outside of New Jersey, VALE is an acronym for Virtual Academic Library Environment. It is a consortium of academic libraries in the state. It is always nice to become reacquainted with colleagues that I see only once a year at this conference. A special “shout out” goes to David McMillan, Ray Schwartz, and Carol Nurse who once worked with me at the NJIT Library. I finally met Trevor Dawes of Princeton University whom I have seen numerous times on Facebook, but finally met him. I didn’t meet Amy Kearns, but I did encounter Connie Paul, one of her colleagues at CJRLC. I had an interesting conversation with Judy Cohn, the Director of the Libraries at UMDNJ. She told me about a trivia site call sporcle.com. I have already played it a number of times since Friday. Thanks Judy.

The keynote speaker was Alex Wright, the Director of User Experience and Product Research at The New York Times and the author of Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages. The title of his talk was “The Web That Wasn’t”. He talked about people who’s contributions indirectly let to the creation of the World Wide Web. They included:

Paul Otlet – creator of the Universal Decimal System (UDC)
Vannevar Bush – inventor of early calculators and science advisor to FDR
Eugene Garfield – Forefather of page ranking and citation indexing
Doug Englebart – creator of the online system NLS
Ted Nelson – coined the term hypertext in 1965
Andres Van Dam
Tim Berners-Lee

I will not discuss the poster session and the breakout which I did not attend. For further information please go to http://www.valenj.org/vale/panel/annual-conference-0

Breakout 1 - Streamlining Reference and Instruction Delivery by Mark Thompson of Bergen County College. He discussed the ways he automated scheduling the reference desk and instructional sessions. This methods helped him save much staff time.

Breakout 2 - The State of Reference in New Jersey Academic Libraries. The VALE Reference Services Committee led by Tony Joachim and Pat Dawson reported on the results of the committee’s survey to determine the ways the various libraries are doing reference today. They survey reported on staffing, and the various reference models used throughout the state.

Breakout 3 - Connecting Library Services to Meet Users Needs: Federated Search Unified Discovery Service, Google Deep Web and Semantic Web? Presented by Jia Mi and Yongming Wang (The College of New Jersey). They mentioned that students and faculty have different approaches to information retrieval from librarians. Students often use only one or two databases and don’t understand the differences among databases offered by their library. They mentioned Scitopia.org and science.gov as meta search engines. Mi and Wang mentioned a few commercial products that allow for federated searching of databases. They gave a brief introduction to the semantic web.

A Very Unusual Reference Question

This afternoon I received a phone call from an alumnus of NJIT asking if I knew what freshman chemistry book was used in 1958 at the Newark College of Engineering which later became NJIT. He said that they professor's name was Tully. Obviously, the chemistry department would not keep a record of that for over 50 years. At that time, my shift was over and was going to lunch.

My thought was to search the library catalog under the subject chemistry and see what we had published in the 1950s. I retrieved the following 3 books:

Basic concepts in chemistry.Illustrated by James R. Holmes.Author: Watt, George Willard,City: New York,Publisher: McGraw-Hill 1958

An introduction to chemistry.Author: Ritter, Howard LCity: New York,Publisher: Wiley 1955

Author: Timm, John Arrend,City: New York,Publisher: McGraw-Hill 1950

All 3 books had a book plate saying:

This book was presented

To the Library of Newark College of Engineering

In Memory of

Thomas James Tully

Professor of Chemistry

1933-58

I called the person back and relayed to him the information. He did believe that one of these books was his freshman chemistry textbook. He said he would either get the books through interlibrary loan or purchase them through a used book dealer.

The man was most appreciative of the efforts I made to find him this information. Why would somebody want his freshman chemistry textbook from over 50 years ago? There is certainly nothing wrong with that, just people just have different values.

I remember my freshman chemistry textbook at City College of New York in 1967 was:

Chemistry : principles and properties [by] Michell J. Sienko [and] Robert A. Plane N.Y. : McGraw-Hill, [1966]

I really don't want to get a copy of that book ever again. I remember I did keep my chemistry books from my City College days for some years, but I must have eventually discarded them.

STELLA Unconference starts Friday January 8th in Denver

STELLA is an acronym for Science, Technology & Engineering Library Leaders in Action. During an unconference the participants plan the agenda of the meeting on the fly. The wiki for this meeting may be found at http://denver-stella.pbworks.com/ . As of today about 80 people registered for it. I am acquainted with a handful of those going to it. I am sure that it will provide a succesful exchange of idea.

Excellent Guide to Facebook

I found out about this excellent guide to Facebook from Ellyssa Kroski's Twitter account:

http://mashable.com/guidebook/facebook/

Please check it out.

Free version of CASSI is now available

I hope all readers of this journal enjoyed the holiday season.

Chemical Abstracts Service announced the availability of a free web version of CASSI. It supports researchers and librarians who need accurate bibliographic information. It may be accessed at http://cassi.cas.org . It may be searched by title, abbreviation, CODEN, ISSN, or ISBN.

Thanks to be the people at CAS for providing this valuable tool free of charge.