Training the Trainers: Creating A Workshop on Teaching Chemical Information

Abstract

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. 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. 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.