Are Faculty Overemphasizing the Use of Peer Reviewed Sources?

I am beginning to wonder if faculty are overemphasizing “peer reviewed journals” when giving assignments to students. I taught an environmental science class where the students were asked to find information about the Keystone Pipeline which is a system to transport synthetic crude oil and diluted bitumen from the Athabasca Oil Sands in northeastern Alberta, Canada to multiple destinations in the United States. This is a topic in the news which has not been discussed yet in academic journals. I advised students to search Lexis-Nexis to find articles in reputable magazines on this topic.

Likewise today a student approached me asking for peer reviewed information about the New Jersey Energy Master Plan which was released by Governor Christie in late 2011. Similarly, this is not a topic in journal articles. I found some good newspaper articles from Lexis-Nexis. A Google search yielded a good analysis written at Rutgers University. Sometimes a Google search will yield appropriate documents. We shouldn’t “demonize” Google searching all of the time.

Chemical Information Literacy on the Fly in 30 Minutes Without Powerpoint

It is always difficult to teach resources in chemical information in a very short period of time. It would take at least a one credit course to cover the major resources that students need to know. I usually meet with new graduate students in chemistry and chemical engineering during their orientation. At that point in time learning to use information resources is not the most important thing to them. I question the effectiveness of my lecture for that reason.

Today, I was invited to lecture to graduate students in an advanced physical chemistry course. The problem was that I had only 30 minutes. I decided not to use any of my standard Powerpoints following the advice of John Fostek, the Editor-In-Chief of the NJIT student newspaper called The Vector. He feels that the use of Powerpoint is so widespread that it makes the speaker’s job irrelevant. Speakers often fall back on the slides when their speaking is weak.

I received the following description of the class from the professor:
The class is assigned literature analysis-
Each has a target molecule -- different molecule and the corresponding radicals that result from loss of hydrogen atoms and from central bond cleavages

They are asked to find thermochemical / thermodynamic paramters like enthalpy of formation , entropy and enthalpy and heat capacitiy data as fcn of temperature dipole moments, polarizability .... lennard jones parameters - cross section ( sigma - small letter) well depth (often written as e/k) k is the boltzman constant an e is an energy

Another assignment is for the class to search for nicotinic agonists they would like to model.

I started by giving each student my business card with an invitation to contact me if they had any questions on how to find information to support their research or coursework. I do find that students are often too shy to approach a reference librarian. I show them the library home page and links to two of my Libguides:

How to find Physical and Thermodynamic Properties of Chemical Sources
Resources in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering.

I suggested that they take the time to examine the resources on those pages.

I picked a few resources to demonstrate:

Index to Physical, Chemical, and Other Property Data – compiled by Arizona State University
NIST Webbook
Chemspider
Scifinder Scholar (a few students said that they used it before)

I can’t measure the effectiveness of this lecture. Only time will tell if the students will come to see me with specific questions on how to find information to answer their questions.

Occupy All STEM Publishers? Will boycotting just one be effective?

A recent article in The Scientist reports that nearly 4,500 researchers have signed an agreement to refrain from publishing in, refereeing, and/or performing editorial services for Elsevier. This boycott was launched when Cambridge Mathematician Timothy Gowers detailed Elsevier’s high prices and practice of bundling journals in package deals. This alludes to Science Direct. The site encouraging scientists to boycott is at http://www.thecostofknowledge.com/ .


As a librarian for a technological college, I am concerned about journal prices and how they take up a very large percentage of our materials budget. Science and engineering journals are more expensive than those in the humanities or social sciences.

Why single out Elsevier when journal costs from other private publishers are very high as well? Even journals from professional societies are very expensive. Will boycotting just Elsevier solve this problem? Is open access publishing the answer?

News from the VALE Reference Services Committee

I am on a subcommittee of the VALE Reference Services Committee to make recommendations about proposed features of the Discovery Tool of the Open Library System (OLS). VALE is now considering these discovery tools for the next generation catalog:

 

• XC Extensible Catalog
• VuFind
• Blacklight

 

The subcommittee has identified about 30 features that can be used with the discovery tool chosen by the Implementation Taskforce. We are in the process of prioritizing these features and making recommendations.

Meet the NJIT Library Reference Staff

From left to right - Heather Dalal, Davida Scharf, Kate Wiggins, and Bruce Slutsky.  I guess I should try to smile more :)

Next Meeting of the METRO Science Librarians SIG

The next meeting of the SIG will be Friday February 24th at 2 PM. The theme will be New Developments in STEM Publishing. The speakers will be:

Ruth Wolfish of IEEE

Karen Berryman of INSPEC

To register go to http://www.metro.org/en/cev/148

There is no charge for this meeting


For further information please contact Bruce Slutsky at slutsky@adm.njit.edu  or 973-642-4950

How to avoid misunderstandings with e-mail

Earlier this week I sent out an e-mail to the METRO Librarians listserv announcing the next meeting of the Science Librarians Special Interest Group. I assume that it goes out to hundreds of recipients. Yesterday I received a very insulting e-mail about my meetings being boring with some weird people attending. It was sent by an assistant library director at a small college in Brooklyn. I felt the need to confront this person with a phone call.


She said that she meant to send it to someone internally about an unrelated matter. She apologized profusely about this and I accepted the apology. There are a few “lessons” that can be learned from this incident.

Always be careful of whom you are sending an e-mail. She replied to the wrong e-mail.

Before you even send an e-mail, think if it is the right form of communication. Very often you must speak to a person face to face or phone them. Sometimes sending an e-mail can be cowardly and create misunderstandings that could lead to animosity.

If you do send an e-mail, please use the same language and tone as if the person were standing in front of you. E-mail does have its place in business and personal communication, but it should not be misused, abused, or overused.  I must admit that there were times in the past that I used e-mail inappropriately, but I feel that I learned from my mistakes.