Free Structure Drawing Programs for Chemists

Professional listservs are often a nuisance. A subscriber can receive umpteen e-mails a day from members of that listserve. Very often someone will start a thread and everyone and his brother has to get his two cents in about the subject. I subscribe to chminf-l, a virtual community of chemical information specialists. I know many of the people from the American Chemical Society Division of Chemical Information. Today there was a post from Symyx Technologies offering a free structure drawing program for academics. I downloaded it myself and passed the information along to my chemistry colleagues at NJIT.

Information Literacy Courses for Credit in New Jersey

I found out that the following colleges in NJ offer for credit courses in information literacy:

• Brookdale Community College
• Mercer County College
• Union College

All 3 are two year institutions.

NJIT Basketball Team Loses to Stony Brook 60-39

They are now 0-6 on the season and have now lost 39 in a row. No further comment.

Looking for an Expert on Colloids in Pharmaceuticals

Yesterday afternoon I attended a seminar given by Professor Raj Dave of the chemical engineering department who summarized his research about nanoparticles. At the end of the seminar Reg Tomkins approached me about looking for a future seminar speaker on colloids in pharmaceuticals. My first thought on doing this was to search Scifinder Scholar using the keywords colloids and pharmaceuticals. The results were somewhat vague. I asked Reg to give me a more definitive topic where I could find experts. I came up with another idea. I searched our online catalog under the subject "colloids in medicine" I found the following two books:


Title:
Colloid stability and application in pharmacy /


Title:
Colloidal nanoparticles in biotechnology /

In the front of each book there is a list of the contributing authors with their afiliations. Most of these authors were from Europe, but I did find a handful of experts that I would think are appropriate for speakers. If necessary, I will do further research on this.

Reference Question of the Day

I received this through QANDANJ:

I need information on toll booth photography, what type of equipment and camera is used.

I searched Google and the Scopus database using the following phrases:

Traffic enforcement cameras
Automatic Number Plate Recognition

The patron was satisfied with the information I sent him.

Information Literacy Forever

With profuse apologies to John Lennon and Paul McCartney

Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to Information Literacy.
Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about.
Information Literacy forever.

Living is easy with eyes closed,
misunderstanding all you see.
It's getting hard to be someone but it all works out.
It doesn't matter much to me.
Let me take you down,
'cause I'm going to Information Literacy.
Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about.
Information Literacy forever.

No one I think is in my tree,
I mean it must be high or low.
That is you can't you know tune in but it's all right.
That is I think it's not too bad.
Let me take you down,
'cause I'm going to Information Literacy.
Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about.
Information Literacy forever.

Always no sometimes think it's me,
but you know I know when it's a dream.
I think, er No, I mean, er Yes but it's all wrong.
That is I think I disagree.
Let me take you down,
'cause I'm going to Information Literacy.
Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about.

Information Literacy forever.
Information Literacy forever.
Information Literacy forever.

Comparing Herbal Medicines to traditional pharmaceuticals

A student was looking for case studies comparing the use of herbal medicines with traditional pharmaceuticals. I showed him how to search for it in Scopus which includes the records for Medline. We did find some good articles, but the problems were that many of the retrieved records were from journals not held in print or electronically from the NJIT library.