Environmental Engineering Students were Attentive for a While

Every semester I teach a class to ENE 262, Introduction to Environmental Engineering. The students must work in teams to write a paper using peer review sources on a related topic. Some of the topics this term are:

• Carbon Footprints of Transportation Vehicles
• Nanoparticles in personal care products
• Sensors for water supply research
• State of the Art in landfilling

The professor had to be at a meeting in Trenton so he picked today for me to give the library lecture. I was afraid that the students would not be attentive and think that the class was not really necessary. I was pleasantly surprised for the first 50 minutes of the class, but toward the end I observed restlessness among the students. I picked a few of the topics and showed how they could be searched in Scopus and in the EPA database. My Powerpoint presentation may be found at http://library.njit.edu/docs/ENE262_Spring2009.ppt

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Remember Microfilm Reader Printers?

This afternoon I assisted a civil engineering graduate student find some old references. We had to order 3 from interlibrary and found 2 from the print collection. However, 3 articles that he needed were in journals that the NJIT library has in micoform only. So, I go up to the machine similar to the one above and saw that both plugs were out. Yes, it has been months since I had to refer someone to the microfilm machine. I always dread it since every patron has to be shown how to use this dinosaur. It turned out that the machine was out of toner. I was told by circulation supervisor that toner was ordered over the summer and she would have to check with the administrative assistant to see if it had arrived.

We retrieved the reels with the articles needed by the student. We told him if the toner cartridge had arrived a student worker would make the copies for him. If not we would order the articles through interlibrary loan. Yes, there are even low tech problems in libraries.

Meeting with the Biomedical Engineering Faculty

Implementing information literacy into the biomedical engineering (BME) curriculum at NJIT has always been a challenge. Until now I have just gotten my "15 minutes of fame" giving a short lecture in the Fundamentals of Engineering Design Course. This is given at the Freshman level when students are using mostly textbooks and would not need the technical journal literature in their field. This morning I had a meeting with a few of the faculty to try to determine where it could fit in. They felt students in BME 310 (biomedical computing) could get an assignment where they would need to find how a signal processing can be applied to a problem in biomedical engineering. They are having a full faculty meeting on Wednesday when they will discuss this.

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Teaching Students How to Find Physical and Thermodynamic Properties of Chemical Substances

I taught this even during my early days at the NJIT Libraries. Back then I brought a book cart of the printed data compilations such as:

• The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics
• Langes Handbook
• JANAF Thermochemical Tables

As the years passed more resources became available on the web for free. I also say that for common substances there are usually several places where they can find the same information. Sometimes there is a conflict of values. Over the years I have compiled a web site with lists of resources where they may find physical and thermodynamic data. I even show how they may even by lucky and find properties of a substance by doing a Google search.

I give them an assignment based on what I cover in the lecture. Students are not allowed to use the Wikipedia. Every semester students seem to find one or more resources not familiar to me. I always say that there is more than one way to skin a cat when trying to find this type of information.

17th Anniversary at NJIT

It was 17 years ago today that I started at the NJIT Library. Within the month of September 1992 4 reference librarians, a director of reference, and a director of technical processing were hired. Let me explain this very unusual situation.

After a new University Librarian was hired in October 1991 almost the entire professional staff resigned within several months. From what I heard there was just not a match between the expectations of the University Librarian and the skills and values of the professional staff that she inherited.

At the same time the library moved to the Central Avenue Building. Back then I kept saying that it was like the blind leading the blind. Eventually we all became acclimated to the situation.

The two directors did not work out and left within two years. One reference librarian left after 5 years while the other three (including myself obviously) remain at NJIT. Two of us are still reference librarians while one moved on to University Web Services.