Chemical Librarianship: Challenges and Opportunities.

This volume is a collection of 12 papers of particular interest to librarians specializing in chemistry. The articles discuss the educational role of librarians in several types of institutions, offer new ways of providing information, and describe ways of coping with increasing prices and formats of journals. The first paper offers an overview of the role of chemistry librarians as teachers. Several papers following cover such related subjects as the pros and cons of teaching chemical information as a separate course versus integrating it into other courses; a one-credit course offered at Oberlin College; an example of integrated instruction using cooperative learning techniques; partnerships with faculty and computing staff which resulted in an experimental program for teaching information skills to a large general chemistry course; and how information instruction is integrated into an undergraduate physical chemistry laboratory. Articles about journals explore an Electronic Seminar System in which graduate students and faculty interact virtually with articles digitized from the print literature; the TOC/DOC service at California Institute of Technology which provides table-of-contents complete with document delivery follow-up; the evolving use of electronic journals and reference sources by faculty; and a survey of national trends in academic serial collections from 1992 to 1994. The final article describes the challenges and benefits of chemical information service in industry. (PVD)