This in-class exercise prepares students for the homework Literature Searching: Bibliography Assignment. It allows them to practice the skills needed for that assignment while in class.

To allow students to become familiar with the structure of chemical literature and provide them with an understanding of several types of basic handbooks.

This assignment will orient new students to searching and finding chemical literature and effectively citing said literature.  The library session focuses on the semantics of the ACS style, overviews appropriate indexing/searching tools, and has students search and find two citations for a future lab assignment for their chemistry class.  

Delicious is a social bookmarking tool that retains bookmarks on the web.  Users can access their bookmarks from any computer, and Delicious allows for the tagging of bookmarks with relevant descriptors for follow up, searching, and collaborative work.  

This is a short activity I developed to help my students interpret Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS). Students rank unknown compounds from least safe to most safe, and the compounds' identities are revealed. The class discusses other factors to consider in evaluating the safety of an experiment. The "MSDS activity" word document contains a more full description.