Chemical information instruction in the age of Google(TM)

Chemical information instruction in the age of

Charles F. HuberDavidson Library, University of

CaliforniaSanta Barbara, CA 93106-9010

Presented at the 232nd ACS National MeetingSan Francisco, CA Monday, September 11, 2006

232nd ACS National Meeting, San Francisco, CA, Sept. 11, 2006

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Chemical Information Instruction in the Age of Google™

The assumptions of the “Google Generation”.

Where they’re wrong and where they’re right

Teaching points from Google What the future holds…


The assumptions of the “Google Generation” The “Millennials” (born 1982-present) are

the generation now passing through higher education.

Social scientists point to a variety of common characteristics of this generation, several of which link to the fact that “they have never known life without computers and the Internet.” (Ollinger, 2003)

Add to that: “or Google.”


Assumptions about information searching in GenGoogle

Assumption 1: “Everything I need is on the Web, and available instantly.”

And corollaries: “If I can’t find it with a Google search, it

probably doesn’t exist.” “All information is free on the Web.” “If it does exist only in print, it’s not

worth my time to find it.”


More assumptions…

Assumption 2: “All searches are ‘good enough’ searches”, i.e. Searches will always find far more hits that you can examine, and the first few (five, ten, twenty) will be good enough.”


Still more assumptions

Assumption 3: “Anything you need can be found by keyword searching.”

The Ideal Interface Corollary: “The ideal search interface looks

like…


Not this…


Let alone this…


But rather this…


Where they’re wrong…and where they’re right. Assumption 1: Partially correct

There’s an awful lot available free on the net, and the amount is growing (digitization projects, institutional repositories, open access journals, etc.)

But there’s still a lot of material that hasn’t been digitized.

A lot of the material that is available in digital form is not free (e.g. most major chemical journals)

Even some that is free isn’t well “crawled” by Google and other search engines (e.g. national patent databases.)


Assumptions: wrong and right Assumption 2: Wrong

Though many searches work well in Google (e.g. for finding basic background information) for some, “good enough” isn’t good enough.

Scholarly review of the literature on a topic requires comprehensive searching to find all.

Patentablility searching requires comprehensive searching to eliminate all.


Assumptions: wrong and right Assumption 3: Critically flawed for

chemical information. Keyword searching can be greatly

improved by intellectually-assigned subject headings.

Chemical substance searching by chemical name alone frequently fails.

Numerical range searching for data doesn’t work with Web search engines.


Teaching opportunities with Google™

Google Advanced Search can be used to introduce: Fielded searching Boolean logic and proximity Search limits


Teaching opportunities with Google™ Google Scholar can be used to

introduce: Distinctions between scholarly and

popular publications Linking to articles

Does your institution have SFX linking to holdings? Has it been implemented for Google Scholar?

Cited reference linking


Teaching opportunities with Google™

Google Book Search can be used to introduce: Use of books in scientific research Concepts of copyright and public

domain


Compare and contrast… Google Book Search and your local online

catalog. Google Book Search can find items, but do you have access to them? Why might you need different search strategies to find the same book in the two resources?

Google Book Search and scientific e-book resources (e.g. Knovel, CRCnetBases) Compare text searching with in-depth indexing (especially of numerical values.)


Compare and contrast… Google Scholar and classic literature

indexes (e.g., CA, Web of Science, INSPEC, etc.) Content – What types of literature do they

index? What’s missing from each? Subject indexing – How does specialized subject

indexing enhance retrieval? Linking features – Cited references, citing

references, CrossRef, “related records” (Note that ISI and Google both use this phrase. But do they mean the same thing?)


Compare and contrast… Google searches on a chemical topic

with intellectually selected collections of Web sites, such as: ChemFinder

(http://chemfinder.cambridgesoft.com/) Chemdex (U. of Sheffield,

http://www.chemdex.org/) Links for Chemists (U. of Liverpool,

http://www.liv.ac.uk/Chemistry/Links/links.html))


Features Google lacks… so far

Detailed chemical searching Molecular formula Chemical synonyms Structure searching (incl.

Substructure and similarity searching) Reaction searching

Analysis tools


Turning “good enough” searching into comprehensive searching For “Millennials”, “Learning more closely

resembles Nintendo than logic” (Ollinger, 2003), that is, they tend to prefer trial-and-error to rigid rules.

But, with a little structure, “trial and error” turns into “pearl-growing”:

Define search needs Determine starting points (keywords, authors, etc.) Use easiest or most readily available search tools Analyze results Build on the “good” results found “Lather, rinse, repeat” until needs met.


What the future holds

Will Google be replaced? Maybe, but whatever replaces it will

be at least as powerful, at least as easy to use… and designed for general searchers, not chemists.

Added sophistication for chemists will come from add-ons designed to work with the basic search engine.


Future for chemical searching More subscription-free literature

But how much, how soon? More literature open to web search

engine robots Open data; specialized markup

languages (e.g. ChemML) which will allow development of Web data search tools.

Substance identifiers which work with web search engines (IUPAC-NIST Chemical Identifier = INChI)


References Kirkwood, Patricia, “Teaching chemical information:

tips and techniques”, 19th Biennial Conference on Chemical Education, West Lafayette, IN, July 30 – August 3, 2006 (Available at: http://acscinf.org/dbx/mtgs/BCCE/2006/index.asp)

Ollinger, Diana, “Boomers, Gen-Xers, Millennials: Understanding the New Students”, EDUCAUSE Review, 38(4) (Jul.-Aug. 2003) 37-47 (Available at: http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0342.pdf)

Grabinski, C. Joanne, “Cohorts of the Future”, New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, no. 77 (Spring 1998) 73-84


Acknowledgements

The UCSB Libraries, University of California – Santa Barbara

Chemistry, biochemistry, and engineering students of UCSB for the past nineteen years

Bartow Culp and the ACS Division of Chemical Education