Submitted a Paper To Science & Technology Libraries for Review

Yesterday I submitted a manuscript to be evaluated for publication in Science & Technology Libraries.  Selena and I worked on this project for about 8 months.  I had to work on researching and writing the paper intermittently.   I certainly understand the need for librarians to take a research leave to work on a project.  We can only wait to see if the paper will be accepted.  My intuition says it will be with some revisions.  If I was required to publish to attain tenure, I would likely be anxious at this point.   Hopefully within a month or so I will be able to announce on this blog that the article was accepted for publication.  My intuition says that it will be after some minor revisions suggested by the reviewers are made.

Teaching Information Resources to Undergraduate Chemical Engineering Students

For several years I have taught to undergraduate students of Che 396 which is described as a capstone chemical engineering laboratory course.  I really have to cover a lot of ground in an hour and a half.  I give my standard lectures on how to find information in chemical engineering.  I include discussions on Scifinder and Scopus.  The bad news was that students did not ask any questions.  Does that imply they are disinterested?  The good news was nobody walked out.  The professor did not want to give an assignment, so I gave out some search questions for them to work on during the last 20 minutes of the class.  The good news was that the students were not averse to doing this task during class hours.  In this case information literacy assessment is impossible.

The Spring Semester Begins Today

Since it is the day after Martin Luther King Day, it means that it is the first day of classes for the Spring Semester.  It will be my 48^th semester as a technical reference librarian at NJIT.  There are slightly less students in the spring as the school has lost more to graduation than it has to students transferring in. Since almost all students are returning, there are fewer directional questions.  I am sure there will be textbook questions as students get sticker shock when they see the prices at the bookstore.  Of course they try to save money by checking it out of the library.  My first reference question of the semester was “how do I get access to Scifinder?”  Life goes on.