Making Some Progress in Promoting Information Literacy in Biomedical Engineering

I have been the library liaison to the biomedical engineering program since it was made an independent department. I've had difficulties in convincing them that training in the use of the library databases is important. For a few years I was only allowed to give a 15 minute lecture in Fundamentals of Engineering Design (FED 101). I thought this was totally ineffectual especially since Freshmen are not ready to understand the journal literature in their major.

This morning I had a short meeting with the professor who teaches BME 310 (Biomedical Computing). He invited me to give a lecture to his class next week to discuss the use of:

• Pubmed Medline
• Scopus
• IEEE Electronic Library

I am somewhat satisfied that I have convinced that department that students should be aware of databases and journals in their field.

My Powerpoint presentation for this class

Analysis of the results an assignment I gave to Chemical Engineering Students

Below is the assignment I gave to the Plant Design Chemical Engineering Class:


Find 3 references with abstracts reporting on the design of monoclonal antibodies. Please report the names of 3 prolific authors and 3 prolific companies or universities doing research in this endeavor. The analyze command in Scifinder will be useful

Find 3 references with abstracts reporting on the production of monoclonal antibodies. Please report the names of 3 prolific authors and 3 prolific companies or universities doing research in this endeavor. The analyze command in Scifinder will be useful

Find 3 references with abstracts that consider safety and or environmental concerns associated with monoclonal antibodies.

Find 3 references with abstracts that discuss ethical issues associated with monoclonal antibodies.

The students a reasonably good job in executing the search and identifying the most relevant articles. Several students omitted the part asking for prolific authors and organizations publishing articles or patents about monoclonal antibodies. I was most disappointed in that most of the submissions did not include the full bibliographic information. They just reported the article title, authors, and abstract.

The reason for this was that in the "Reference Detail" screen in Scifinder Scholar, the source information is to the right. The students simply copied the article title, authors and abstract and pasted that into an MS Word file. If they had used the export command all the bibliographic information would have been displayed.

I learned that students must be given explicit instructions on how to do an assignment.

American Chemical Society Career Consultants Program

For over 20 years I have been involved in the American Chemical Society Career Consultants Program. We evaluate resumes and give mock interviews at national meetings of the society. One of our main services is to give advice to chemists on career related issues. My speciality is to advise chemist working in the laboratory of the option of becoming a chemical information specialist or a science librarian. I made that career transition over 30 years ago.

Today I had my first case in about 1 1/2 years. I spoke to a woman from Texas who worked for a comapny that manufacutres nutritional supplements. She has worked in the laboratory and as an interdepartmental technical liaison. She seemed unhappy with her current situation and wanted to make a career move.

I suggested to her that she make major changes in her resume since it appeared very vague as to her immediate career goals. It also lacked some details which would be helpful in getting her interviews. I also advised her the the economic situation is very bad right now and that people must be grateful to be gainfully employed. Making a career move could be very risky.

I invited her to contact me again after she made revisions to her resume. ACS Career consultants can't find jobs for the candidates, but can help them in learning job hunting techniques.

METRO Science Librarians SIG meeting is rescheduled for Monday April 26

Thanks for your interest in the Joint Upstate Downstate Science Librarians SIG meeting which was originally scheduled for February 10th, but had to be postponed due to a snow storm. This meeting is rescheduled for Monday April 26 from 1:00 PM – 4:30 PM. You may come to METRO Headquarters or attend the web conference. Details on how to register will be announced at the end of March.

Coping with E-mail Overload

I must get a few hundred e-mails a day at work and at my personal address. How many of them are meaningful? For so many I just look at the header and delete the e-mail immediately. Other times I just read the first few lines of the message and quickly realize that it is not important. Excessive e-mail falls into the following categories:

• Advertisements - if you purchase something online, the vendor will send you countless e-mails for years
• Professional listservs -sometimes a topic is interesting at first and then everybody has to get his two cents and contribute to the discussion. Very often a poster will just say "I agree" or just not add anything new to the discussion. Listservs are an important method of communication among colleagues, but it should not be overused.
• Spam - no spam filter is perfect.

I think I spend more time deleting e-mail than I do reading the ones that are worthwhile. I would not want to delete a message that I really need. To use the old cliche "I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water."

Reference Question of the Day

I received this question from a chemical engineering professor: What is the solubility of argon in molten sodium?

I checked the following book:



Gases in molten salts /volume editors, Reginald P.T. Tomkins, Narottam P. Bansal.Author: Tomkins, R. P. T.(Reginald P. T.)



It gave the solubility of argon in molten sodium salts, but not in sodium metal. So I searched Scifinder Scholar. I started searching on Argon as a substance and limited it to properties. I then refined it using solubility and molten sodium. I retrieved 8 hits, but from the abstract only one had the answer:



New Data on the Solubility of Inert Gases in Liquid Alkali Metals at High Temperature
By Shpil'rain, E. E.; Skovorod'ko, S. N.; Mozgovoi, A. G.
From High Temperature (Translation of Teplofizika Vysokikh Temperatur) (2002), 40(6), 825-831. Language: English, Database: CAPLUS
The soly. of helium, neon, argon, krypton, and xenon in molten lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium, and cesium is calcd. in the ranges of temp. from 600 to 1500 K and pressure from 0.1 to 10 MPa. The calcd. data are compared, in comparable ranges of the parameters of state, with the results of the exptl. investigations available in the literature of the soly. of inert gases in liq. alkali metals.



The abstract doess not have the piece of data needed. We will have to retrieve the article to find the exact data required.

The Joint Upstate Downstate Science Librarians Web Conference is postponed

Due to a major snowstorm predicted for New York City tomorrow, I chose to postpone the joint Upstate Downstate meeting of science and medical librarians. This is a big disappointment for me since I spent so much planning it over the past few months. I was going to wait until tomorrow morning to make the decision, but I was getting e-mails this afternoon from people saying they couldn't come. I will consult with the speakers and find a mutually convenient date and reschedule it.

When I last checked the Weather Channel, the prediction in NYC was 10-16 inches. The NYC school system already announced a closure for tomorrow. They usually don't make those decisions so early.

Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

Strategic Planning for the NJIT Library

When an organization writes a strategic plan, they are essentially making a wish list of what it would like to do in the future. Very often there are financial and other contraints that prevents them from accomplishing their goals. The NJIT wrote a strategic plan for 2005-2009. We were asked to submit suggestions for such a document covering 2011-2015. My suggestions:


Adopt mobile computing technologies. For example, Nature now has an iPhone application. In the very near future, more electronic journals and databases will be available through PDAs and other mobile technologies. We should pursue this aggressively.

Spend a larger percentage of the book budget for electronic books. Currently, EBL is the only platform we are using. Perhaps other vendors should be considered.

Have only one service point with the Van Houten Library. The overwhelming majority of reference questions are answered satisfactorily by student workers. The reference staff should become embedded librarians and have offices in their respective departments.

More aggressively use Web 2.0 technologies to promote library services. We should use Facebook, Twitter, blogs, wikis, Slideshare, and other services more extensively than we do today.

Expand digital projects which may require more permanent and/or temporary personnel. This may also require external funding:

Develop a finding aid and digitize the Estrin Collection
Catalog the Weston Collection
Develop an institutional repository

Space issues
The area in the front (where Jackie Rock used to be) has become a storage area. I suggest that this area become the library lounge where students can eat and drink. It should also be used as a 24 hour room where students can study when the library is closed.

A Writing Center be developed and placed in the library building. In order to do that the Pre-College program would have to move out of the Central Avenue Building or the building would have to expand into the parking lot.

Since the usage of older bound journals is minimal, they can be consolidated by using compact shelving to free the third floor for more group study rooms.

NJIT is Joining the Open Courseware Consortium (OCW)

The following announcement was made today by Joel Bloom, Vice President for Academic and Student Services and Dean, Albert Dorman Honors College , and Donald Sebastian, Senior Vice President for Research and Development and Interim Provost:

NJIT is joining MIT, Michigan State, UC Berkeley and the University of Michigan as members of the Open Course Consortium (OCW). The OCW is a collaboration of more than 200 higher education institutions from around the world that make high quality educational materials available at no cost to faculty, students, and self-learners throughout the world. NJIT’s participation in the OCW enables us to add to the sharing of knowledge worldwide. OCW is often used to help complete projects in underdeveloped countries. All faculty who participate in OCW do so on a voluntary basis. NJIT already has educational materials from 30 NJIT courses which will be part of this effort.

Getting Ready for the Upstate Downstate Science Librarians Web Conference

I had an e-mail exchange this morning with Jason Kucsma of METRO about the forthcoming web conference on Wednesday February 10. He said that 41 people registered for it. I am aware that there will be groupps at Syracuse University and Cornell. We checked out the Dimdim web conferencing software. We found out that it will not work with Version 8 of the Internet Explorer browser. Other than that everything went well.

Chat Reference Question of the Day

I received this chat reference question from a student at Northeastern University. It is very frustrating to a librarian during a chat session when nothing happens for several minutes. We often assume that the student is multitasking or just not paying attention. As you can see below, ther seemed to be a software problem since the student said that all of the messages popped up at once.



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Chat Transcript: I am looking for scholarly sources that explain any new health care compliance policies with regard to medical marketing. I have been searching for almost a week now and have been unseccuessful. Can you please help?
Librarian 1:15:30:26 2010/02/03 (GMT-5)
Note: Patron's screen name: Library Patron
Librarian 1:15:31:24 2010/02/03 (GMT-5)
Librarian 'NJ INSTofTECH Bruce' has joined the session.
Librarian 1:15:31:39 2010/02/03 (GMT-5)
Hi, I'm Bruce Slutsky, a librarian at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Your library and my library are part of a nationwide cooperative of libraries that staff this service. I'm reading your question now.
Librarian 1:15:32:13 2010/02/03 (GMT-5)
May I ask which sources have you already checked?
Patron:15:33:16 2010/02/03 (GMT-5)
I have searched Cinhal, Medline, and Business Source Premier
Librarian 1:15:34:31 2010/02/03 (GMT-5)
I had those in mind, but perhaps you did not use a good search strategy. I don't think that Medline considers marketing issues. Please give me a few minutes and I'll do my best for you.
Patron:15:34:48 2010/02/03 (GMT-5)
thanks
Librarian 1:15:36:15 2010/02/03 (GMT-5)
There is a journal called Health Care compliance that I found through Business Source Premier
Librarian 1:15:37:24 2010/02/03 (GMT-5)
Here is an absttract of an article that I found. Please look at it and tell me if it is what you need.
Librarian 1:15:37:29 2010/02/03 (GMT-5)
The article discusses the implications of off-label settlement between Cephalon Inc. and U.S. off-label marketing prosecutions. According to the author, the settlement has served as a concrete example on the importance of maintaining off-label marketing compliance practice in accordance to government regulations and policies. In addition, the author notes that Cephalon agreed on the settlement of misdemeanor count with a guilty plea regarding the illegal distribution of misbranded drug to avoid the risk of debarment which is harmful to their business operations. Moreover, the author stressed that off-label sales and marketing compliance are necessary in businesses to comprehend liabilities rules.
Librarian 1:15:43:38 2010/02/03 (GMT-5)
Are you still there? I searched Business Source Premier and used health care compliance as a keyword pharase AND marketing as a subject term
Librarian 1:15:46:38 2010/02/03 (GMT-5)
A reference chat needs to be interactive, I can help you if you get back to me
Patron:15:49:41 2010/02/03 (GMT-5)
My apologies... all of you messages popped up at once just now. I am reading.
Librarian 1:15:49:43 2010/02/03 (GMT-5)
There were 12 hits which may answer your question
Patron:15:50:49 2010/02/03 (GMT-5)
this is good. thank for your help
Librarian 1:15:51:58 2010/02/03 (GMT-5)
Try that search strategy in Business Source Premier. You may want use that database to peruse through articles from the Journal of Health Care Compliance
Patron:15:54:18 2010/02/03 (GMT-5)
okay. will do
Librarian 1:15:54:35 2010/02/03 (GMT-5)
Is there anything else I can do for you?
Librarian 1:15:57:17 2010/02/03 (GMT-5)
I'm very sorry, but I have to log off of this chat service now. If you'd like more help with your question, please login again and another librarian will be able to assist you. I apologize for any inconvenience.
Librarian 1:15:57:26 2010/02/03 (GMT-5)
Librarian ended chat session.
Librarian 1:15:57:30 2010/02/03 (GMT-5)
Note: Set Resolution: Answered

Nature is now available on the iPhone

The nature.com iPhone application allows you to access science news stories and the latest published research from Nature Publishing Group. A fast, attractive interface lets you get straight to the news and research you need and lets you read it comfortably and with minimum fuss. You will be asked to create an account when you access the apps for the first time. This app has the following features:

• You can read on your iPhone or press on the save button and a downloadable citation for that article will appear on a website.


• You may set up saved searches on PubMed or nature.com so that you can be alerted to new, relevant research as soon as it gets published.


• There is a zoom an pan feature which allows you to see the figure enlarged and in more detail

During the preview period you will not need to have a subscription to any Nature to read full text articles through the iPhone application. Eventually this will change but you’ll always be able to read the full text of certain articles and the titles and abstracts for everything else. Presently only content from Nature journal is available, but the publisher plans to add content from other journals and websites as soon as possible.

Lecture to Chem E 380 - Introduction to Biotechnology

The course outcome for this class was as follows:

Students will have a good background in basic aspects of classical (cell structure, microbial growth and metabolism) as well as molecular microbiology (DNA structure and replication, RNA and protein synthesis, recombinant DNA). They will be exposed to current and potential future applications of biotechnology. They will be able to identify and discuss major engineering problems/challenges in biotechnology along with potential solutions.

The students are given an assignment to find information on how to manufacture various substances via a fermentation process. Some of the substances were:

• Ethanol
• Acetone
• Citric Acid
• Factor VIII
• Monoclonal antibodies

The first 3 on the list are well know substances that have been "around forever" while the last two are relatively new. I should the students how to find the information using:

• Scifinder Scholar - web and client software versions
• Scopus
• Science Direct
• Google Patents

When I demonstrated the search in Scifinder Scholar many of the relevant references were in the patent literature so I showed them how to use the linking function to get the full text of the patent.

Web Site for the 2010 New JerseyChemistry Olympics

The web site for information on the 2010 New Jersey Chemistry Olympics is:

http://sites.google.com/site/njchemistryolympics/