Implementing the information literacy plan for NJIT

Earlier this month I discussed the core information literacy (IL) competencies at NJIT. This morning we had a staff meeting on how to implement the information literacy plan. It obviously will not happen overnight. It is the responsibility of the individual academic departments to insure that every undergraduate obtains the necessary instruction in the eight IL outcomes. The librarians will assist faculty in identifying and/or developing relevant educational materials.

Departments and colleges are required to develop their own IL plan for each of their undergraduate programs due to the UCRC (University Curriculum Revision Committee) by October 15, 2009 which will review the IL plans and respond to the college or department by December 1, 2009. All programs will start implementing their IL plans by the Spring 2010 semester. All programs must archive assessment evidence supporting their IL plans in time for the next Middles States Accreditation.

Back to Work - It's Summer Session One

It can be a "downer" to return to work after a vacation, but as I read about all the layoffs in the business world, I must be grateful to have a job. Summer Session One is usually slow at NJIT. Only a small fraction of the students that are here in a normal semester take classes over the summer. The session is only 5 weeks, so every course is very concentrated. Even though the number of class hours is the same over the summer, inevitably less ground is covered. There was an "unwritten rule" that you should not take a course in your major during the summer.

2009 New Jersey Chemistry Olympics Today

I interrupted my vacation to participate in the New Jersey Chemistry Olympics as I've done for many years. NJIT hosts this competition for high school chemistry students throughout the state. I organized and judged an event called the information search which consists of two parts:

• Students bring in a model of a molecule and are judged on its accuracy. This year they had a choice of several pesticide molecules. If they picked a more complex molecule, their score would be higher.
• Students must answer questions about pesticides from electronic resources. I proved a suggested list of databases, but they may "Google away" if they would like. They must answer the questions within 25 minutes.

The competition went very smoothly this year. I had two graduate students assisting me with the information search while an NJIT chemistry professor and a high school teacher evaluated the molecular models.

A team from Tenafly High School won the information search and the entire competition as well.

Last Day before Vacation

One nice thing about working in academia is the vacation time. At NJIT we get 20 vacation days plus 3 personal days. You can only carry 5 weeks from one year to the next, so even if there are no plans to go away, I should take time off to rest at home. The daily grind can get to anyone after a while, so I should use the vacation time to "recharge my batteries."

I will actually come back on Wednesday May 20 to be a judge at the New Jersey Chemistry Olympics.

Bye, for now.

Engineering Information Grant Programs

Today I had a discussion about applying for a grant focusing on Enhancing Communication and Use of Information in Engineering. The details may be found at:

• http://www.eifgrants.org/info/progareas.html
  http://www.eifgrants.org/info/infostmt.html

Some thoughts:

Funds from this grant could be used to hire a consultant to teach students to improve:

Public speaking skills
Powerpoint skills

Another alternative would be to develop an Itunes lecture on this.

I will pursue this further when I return from vacation at the end of this month.

Reference Question of the Day

Again this one came from QANDANJ. A student from Eastern Illinois University wanted review articles on sexual abstinence education programs in high schools. I was able to send her some articles from Academic Search Premier. This person actually gave her full first and last name in the chat transcripts. I just hate it when students use a silly handle.

Do Library User Surveys really tell the real story?

I reported in this blog a few weeks ago that after a user of Scifinder Scholar asked for reinstatement of the client version, I ran a poll of users to ascertain their preference. Out of 17 people who answered the poll, 9 preferrred the client, 7 the web, and 1 had no preference. 80% of the registered users at that point did not vote. At that point I restored one user to the client version splitting my 2 Scifinder seats.

I have carefully monitored the usage of Scifnder for 3 1/2 weeks after I restored the client version. Statistics show that there were 174 uses of the web (69.3%) and 77 uses of the client (30.7%). Go figure.

Do library user surveys tell the real story?