The American Chemical Society (ACS) Committee on Professional Training (CPT) presented new ACS Undergraduate Professional Education guidelines that were implemented in Spring 2008 (1). One notable change is the summary of student skills in section seven. This section discusses skills that chemistry graduates should master to become successful professionals. Many of these skill sets were implied in previous guidelines, but now they are clearly articulated in one place. We appreciate this change and would like to address two specific areas, Chemical Literature and Communication skills, and the incorporation of these skills into our curriculum.The previous and current guidelines suggest that a course in Chemical Literature is one way that undergraduates can be exposed to and learn how to retrieve information from the chemical literature, including chemical abstracts and other online database tools. We recognize that search and retrieval skills are important, but what does it mean "to use the chemical literature effectively and efficiently" (2)? Our interpretation of this statement is the ability to evaluate, interpret, and incorporate chemical literature when communicating; we call this chemical research literacy.We contend that stated Chemical Literature skills (search and retrieval) are not the same as chemical research literacy, because the previous lacks development of the higher-level skills of evaluation and interpretation. In a review of our department curriculum, we believed that chemical research literacy should be introduced before the spring term of the junior year when our students typically complete the Chemistry Literature course.
Establishing and maintaining an institutional repository requires thoughtful and active outreach efforts to many campus constituencies. Over the past two years, librarians at Augustana College have communicated with many members of their campus community to build collaborations and collect content to fill their repository. Connie Ghinazzi, Research and Outreach librarian at Augustana College, drew on her experiences doing outreach for the Augustana Digital Commons to detail strategies that librarians can use to establish and grow their institutional repositories, including crafting a mission statement, identifying collaboration partners, acting on plans, and celebrating and reflecting on successes.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.