Document Type
Presentation
Date
2015
Keywords
chemical safety
Disciplines
Library and Information Science
Description/Abstract
The Internet provides ready access to a wide variety of information sources relevant to answering chemical safety questions in the laboratory. However, this information is found in a wide variety of formats with varying audiences and intents. The quality of the information is difficult to evaluate, organize, and use to support risk assessment of laboratory work with hazardous chemicals. Professionals in health and safety, chemistry librarianship and informatics are partnering to address these challenges particularly in the academic research and teaching context. Goals are to streamline access to relevant data from authoritative sources, organize and classify chemical safety information to support domain based decision making processes, and tap into digitally curated data in sustainable, scalable. Chemistry librarians are well positioned to support this effort, bringing extensive familiarity with relevant database organization and domain vocabularies, a strong sense of practical solutions to address end user needs and the application of information literacy skills to critically evaluate sources and applications. Participation in this field case in turn informs further service to the chemistry and health and safety communities at our home institutions. This talk will describe a number of collaborative efforts the American Chemical Society Divisions of Chemical Safety (CHAS) and Chemical Information (CINF), the PubChem Project of the National Center of BioInformatics of the National Library of Medicine and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC).
Recommended Citation
McEwen, Leah, "Organizing chemical information to support lab safety" (2015). Upstate New York Science Librarians Conference. 67.
https://surface.syr.edu/nyscilib/67
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
