October 2009 – the Undergraduate Science Librarian

chemistry, information literacy, undergraduate

My own personal “Chemistry Week”

The image "Chemoluminescence" is courtesy of Flickr user "everyone's idle"

The official, American Chemical Society “Chemistry Week” was last week, October 18-24th. Lots of exciting events took place in lots of wonderful locations.

But this week, October 26-30, is my own personal Chemistry Week. This week, I will teach 4 two hour information literacy sessions to organic chemistry students, provide the lesson plan and all in-class content for three additional sections of organic chemistry, and teach a session on evaluating resources and expanding your literature search to senior seminar students.

I recently gave a presentation about what types of things we talk about at the various levels. I enjoy teaching theses sessions, and I believe they are useful to the students.

This year I’m trying to focus on assessment – are the students actually learning what we want them to learn? Do they already know it before our session? Do they think the sessions are useful?

Each student in the organic lab is completing a brief follow up survey, so we can get a sense of how useful the session is and whether the students actually learned what we wanted to teach them. For this follow up survey we are asking a few questions about learning outcomes, plus a couple of attitudinal questions.

In the upper level seminar, students are filling out a brief survey about their previous research experiences, to give me a sense of their comfort level with certain resources (Scopus or SciFinder) and to allow them the opportunity to ask any research questions prior to our session (I’m not anticipating that they will have many). While students are normally not very good at assessing their own weaknesses, this will give us some information about student attitudes toward research.

I’m excited about seeing the result – hopefully they will allow the chemistry faculty and I to continue to improve the way we teach about the chemical literature and literature searching.

projects

I really like my job

smiley face stickers courtesy of Flickr user South Carolinas Northern Kingdom — smiley face stickers courtesy of Flickr user "South Carolina's Northern Kingdom"

I enjoy searching for information – tracking down obscure citations and rejoicing over finding a related article in a different field. I love a search that goes from online resources to older print materials and back again.

I was asked recently to work with a faculty member to do a literature review for a journal manuscript in science education, and I have been having a lot of fun tracking things down.

I had a starting place – a list of preliminary sources and a rough draft of the paper – to guide my work, but it took off in many directions.

So, what techniques have I pursued?

Starting from the preliminary bibliography, I can examine the works cited sections of those papers to find additional relevant material.
In addition, I can use Scopus to track citations forward in time.
Exploring keywords in multiple databases. Like any search, there isn’t just one way to describe the topic we are searching.
Using Google and other specialized search engines to explore the web. There is a lot of science education material on the web that has been posted by various educators.

I was working with a topic I found interesting, in a field I am familiar with, with a faculty member who is nice to work with. It all adds up to job satisfaction.

communication

Decreasing budgets and increasing costs – working with faculty to mitigate the damage

Image courtesy of Flickr user ehisforadam

Like many academic libraries, our library budget has recently been cut. Last year, we dealt with the cuts by severely cutting our book budget and our student employee budget. This year, the additional budget cuts made some journal cancellations necessary. Most of our cuts involve canceling individual print or online subscriptions if we already had access via an aggregator (like ProQuest or Ebsco). We have (thankfully) been able to almost completely make up our budget gap without loosing access to any content.

As a result of examining our journal subscriptions, the opportunity arose to subscribe to the full text geology resource GeoScienceWorld. If we canceled individual subscriptions to journals that were available in GeoScienceWorld, we could almost make up the difference. We would need to cancel a couple of other journals in order to make this feasible.

I thought that the increased content and ease of use provided by GeoScienceWorld made this a good move, and I took the question to the Geosciences department.

I created a list of individual journals we would need to cancel (that would be available GeoScienceWorld). I created a list of journals that we would gain access to. I also created a list of suggested cancellations we would have to make in order to make up the difference. In creating my list of suggested cancellations, I worked hard to minimize the loss of content.

In a meeting with the Geosciences library representative and department chair, they were very receptive to my plan, even suggested some cancellations that I assumed would be ‘off limits’.

Overall, they understood the budget pressures – their departmental budget had also been cut – and they appreciated the fact that this decision was being left (mostly) in their hands. The department chair was going to bring the information back to the department for a final decision – making sure that all the faculty are in the loop.

I am pleased with the communication between the library and the faculty on this issue, and I will try to use this example as a model in future decisions regarding departmental resources.