Grace Baysinger
Publication Details
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Training the Trainers: Creating A Workshop on Teaching Chemical Information
Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship. 1997; (16)
Researchers in chemistry, whether in academia or industry, need training in the use of chemical information resources. The American Chemical Society's {Committee on Professional Training} has long recognized the need for {chemical information instruction} as part of the general preparation for both undergraduate and graduate students in chemistry. Even in this era of powerful electronic resources designed for end-user chemists, there is still a need for many types of chemical information instruction. However, in both academic and corporate settings, such instruction is often carried out by chemists with little or no library training, or librarians with little or no formal chemistry training, and in either case, frequently little training in instructional methods. To help meet these needs, the Education Committee of the ACS {Division of Chemical Information (CINF)} has sponsored workshops on teaching chemical information at ACS National Meetings, regional meetings and at the Biennial Conference on Chemical Education. These workshops, developed and taught for the most part by Arleen Somerville (Carlson Library, University of Rochester) and Dr. Adrienne Kozlowski (Department of Chemistry, Central Connecticut State University) have proven very successful. In an effort to reach new audiences, the CINF Education Committee joined forces with the {Chemistry Division} of the Special Libraries Association to offer the workshop as a Continuing Education course at the 1997 SLA Annual Meeting in Seattle. The authors, Grace Baysinger and Chuck Huber, volunteered to adapt the existing workshop and teach it at Seattle. Both the March, 1996 version of the Somerville/Kozlowski workshop and our June, 1997 workshop are available at the CINF Education Committee website. Therefore, this paper is not a recapitulation of the contents of the workshop, but rather a description of the process we went through in designing our workshop and how it reflects some of the lessons we thought were valuable in teaching chemical information in general. URL: http://www.istl.org/97-fall/article1.html
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