Steacie Science and Engineering Library:
2006 Open House for Science Graduate Students
On Thursday, February 16, 2006, the Steacie Science and Engineering Library held its second annual Open House for graduate students in science programs. This year we had a 50% higher turnout than last year.
The Open House began with students gathering at Steacie in the meeting/lunchroom. Acting Head John Dupuis introduced himself and the rest of the staff, and everyone started into very full program.
Rajiv Nariani first gave students a tour of the Steacie Library homepage, demonstrating links to SciTech digital images, PDA handheld resources, and the archival scientific resources featuring biographies of scientists that he has recently added to the website.
Chris Mesquida provided students with an overview of interlibrary loans at Steacie that included a demonstration of the RACER electronic requesting interface and how to request articles from CISTI.
Laura Walton introduced students to the new Graduate Student Reading Room in Scott Library, and showed them how to obtain the access code into this beautiful new facility.
Nathalie Zhou demonstrated the Subject Research Guides, and showed students what kinds of information resources can be accessed through these pathfinders. She also introduced them to Scifinder Scholar and described its scope and versatility for searching for chemistry publications.
Ilo Maimets introduced the RefWorks citation management software, discussed the different ways of downloading citations into files, and gave a brief demonstration of Write-N-Cite. Surprisingly, very few had heard of RefWorks, but all wanted to start using it.
The final presentation was on Wikipedia. John Dupuis explained its structure and usefulness particularly for finding information on science topics, and this led into a discussion on how students can use Wikis for collaboration and advertising the work done in their labs.
The pizza was inhaled and the door prizes – interesting loot picked up from various conferences – were distributed. (Surprisingly, no one wanted the boomerang!) We had a very satisfying and enjoyable day, and all agreed that this is becoming a successful tradition.
If we get even more students attending next year, we will have to find larger facilities to fit them all in.
