"Chemicalinformation instruction in the age of Google(TM"" is a bpaper presented on September 11, 2006 at the 232nd American Chemical Society National Meeting in San Francisco, CA. It discusses the challenges and opportunities for chemical information instruction to a generation of students who grew up with Google.

1. Chemical information instruction
in the age of
Charles F. Huber
Davidson Library, University of California
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9010
Presented at the 232nd
ACS National Meeting
San Francisco, CA Monday, September 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…

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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Still more assumptions
 Assumption 3: “Anything you need can
be found by keyword searching.”
 The Ideal Interface Corollary:
 “The ideal search interface looks like…

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Not this…

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Let alone this…

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But rather this…

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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Teaching opportunities with
Google™
 Google Advanced Search can be used
to introduce:
 Fielded searching
 Boolean logic and proximity
 Search limits

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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

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Teaching opportunities with
Google™
 Google Book Search can be used to
introduce:
 Use of books in scientific research
 Concepts of copyright and public domain

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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.)

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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?)

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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))

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Features Google lacks… so
far
 Detailed chemical searching
 Molecular formula
 Chemical synonyms
 Structure searching (incl. Substructure and
similarity searching)
 Reaction searching
 Analysis tools

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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

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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