Another Frustrating Experience in Information Literacy

For many years I have taught a one hour lecture on how to find physical and thermodynamic properties of chemical substances.  I even remember back in the 1990s taking a book truck with me holding print data compilations.  Obviously, times have changed an all the resources demonstrated are electronic.

This morning I received an e-mail from the professor stating that he had the flu and would not come in.  He did notify the class to come to the training room in the library for the lecture.  Only 7 of the 14 students enrolled in that class showed up.  What is exasperating is that the students cut a class in their major.  I guess the "substitute teacher mentality" has reared its ugly head again.  At least the students who came appeared to be attentive.

How a Chemistry Librarian Aced a Difficult Poetry Reference Question

Today I answered the first poetry reference question I received in my career.  We received the following question via e-mail.  I am changing the requester’s name to protect his privacy.

 My name is "Arnold Grunt". I am in search of a very old poem I wrote in 1989. I won Honorable Mention in the 12th Annual NJ Poetry Contest. I would be a great delight to see it once again. The name of the poem is "The Once And Forever Friend".

I really hope you can locate it, Would mean the world to me. Thank you very much either way. 

The obvious thing to do in this day and age is to Google the name of the poem.  The next step is the Google the author’s name and poems.  The next approach was to Google New Jersey Poetry Contest.  These approaches were unsuccessful.

I began to wonder why this person would contact the NJIT Library since our collection is primarily geared toward scientific and engineering resources.

Just for the heck of it I searched our library’s catalog using the keywords poetry and New Jersey.  I found the following book series:

The best student poetry in New Jersey.  We had volumes from 1979-1990.  I looked in the 1989 volume and sure enough the poem was there.  I scanned the page and sent it to the requester who was in the 5th grade in 1989. 

It turns out that the volumes were edited by the late Herman Estrin who put was Professor of English at NJIT.  Apparently this person remembered the competition was at NJIT back in 1989 and thought to contact the school 25 years later to find his poem.

Hey!  I am a chemistry librarian.