Chemical Information Literacy on the Fly in 30 Minutes Without Powerpoint

It is always difficult to teach resources in chemical information in a very short period of time. It would take at least a one credit course to cover the major resources that students need to know. I usually meet with new graduate students in chemistry and chemical engineering during their orientation. At that point in time learning to use information resources is not the most important thing to them. I question the effectiveness of my lecture for that reason.

Today, I was invited to lecture to graduate students in an advanced physical chemistry course. The problem was that I had only 30 minutes. I decided not to use any of my standard Powerpoints following the advice of John Fostek, the Editor-In-Chief of the NJIT student newspaper called The Vector. He feels that the use of Powerpoint is so widespread that it makes the speaker’s job irrelevant. Speakers often fall back on the slides when their speaking is weak.

I received the following description of the class from the professor:
The class is assigned literature analysis-
Each has a target molecule -- different molecule and the corresponding radicals that result from loss of hydrogen atoms and from central bond cleavages

They are asked to find thermochemical / thermodynamic paramters like enthalpy of formation , entropy and enthalpy and heat capacitiy data as fcn of temperature dipole moments, polarizability .... lennard jones parameters - cross section ( sigma - small letter) well depth (often written as e/k) k is the boltzman constant an e is an energy

Another assignment is for the class to search for nicotinic agonists they would like to model.

I started by giving each student my business card with an invitation to contact me if they had any questions on how to find information to support their research or coursework. I do find that students are often too shy to approach a reference librarian. I show them the library home page and links to two of my Libguides:

How to find Physical and Thermodynamic Properties of Chemical Sources
Resources in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering.

I suggested that they take the time to examine the resources on those pages.

I picked a few resources to demonstrate:

Index to Physical, Chemical, and Other Property Data – compiled by Arizona State University
NIST Webbook
Chemspider
Scifinder Scholar (a few students said that they used it before)

I can’t measure the effectiveness of this lecture. Only time will tell if the students will come to see me with specific questions on how to find information to answer their questions.