Chemical Education Today
The Digital Journal, or What Is an Issue, Anyway? My brain is completing its sixth decade of activity, and it has served me quite well to this point. There are times when I don't have instant recall of some name or event, but it seems like a great deal of information has been processed in this gray matter at one time or another. For example, I learned a second language at home in my youth. Some of the vocabulary even survives, but I am attempting to learn more using electronic tutorials in anticipation of an international trip. As a result of this exercise, I am amazed not just at the demands the “information age” put on all of us but also at the available tools, especially electronic ones, which have let me access information over my career. My generation has experienced remarkable changes related to the transmission of information. I grew up reading books, often from the library, and later, the ones that I bought. I valued them and kept them, including textbooks. Books have always been, and will continue to be, important, authoritative, and convenient repositories of information. I can still tell you a very good book in which to find a very complete table of acidities of organic acids. However, I am willing to see the advantages of new technologies. I just entered “acidities of organic acids” into my favorite Web search engine and instantly have access to 578,000 potential matches. (That said, I am still secure in knowing where that book is on my shelf!) When I recount my 30-year-old experiences of looking up compounds and registry numbers in the print version of Chemical Abstracts Services to current graduate students, they often just roll their eyes. After my schooling, I continued that literature searching routine for a book chapter as an assistant professor after a few years, although by that time crude dial-up access and electronic database searching were becoming available. At least in the early 1970s and 1980s, the chemical literature was doubling every 10 years (1). This means there is currently at least 8 to 10 times as much to examine now as there was 30 years ago. Even though I am at a nostalgic part of my life, I don't wish that sort of manual searching on anyone: It's “pagan ritual” of the worst kind, and in retrospect, it was not the most efficient or productive activity during those formative years. Finding the citations is much easier now, but there are more papers or articles to read and manage. This Journal has a major role in providing information about the teaching and learning of chemistry. How we expect to accomplish that is a major concern of this editor and the entire chemistry education community. What this Journal literally looks like and how it functions will certainly change, and electronic distribution is driving most of those adjustments. The electronic age provides new tools but also a challenge on how to use them. Another connection to Journal content comes to mind as I complete another activity in parallel with writing. I am transferring music from some polymer-based storage devices to my special electronic device, the one that comes with the noisecanceling headphones for the airplane. I am being annoyed by the clever software that comes with the device. It wants to reorganize
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something that I consider an indivisible unit, formerly known as the record album or music CD. That annoying software wants to divide the album into several parts based on the artist or performer. It seems like the current commercial music model is to buy a song (or rent it or lease it) online. What's an album or CD? Back in the day, they were some musician's or producer's view of what you should listen to for 75 min, or at least a convenient way to package and sell that content. So now I have to ask, “What's a Journal issue?” It's a carefully crafted collection of content that editorial staff have selected for a set of readers. It's also a convenient way to package such content. And now comes the puzzle. Is a Journal issue indivisible? Just what is the smallest unit in Journal publishing? Electronic publishing provides both a dilemma and opportunity. A cluster of articles, lab experiments, comments, and book reviews on a related topic are completely lost if you view the contents exclusively through a search engine. Several wise people thought about how that collection of Journal items was better together at least in print, rather than randomly floating around in the accessible memory of a massive storage device. Our print Journal promotes the idea of themes. Our online Journal excels at searching and retrieval—instantly helping us find the Journal equivalent of Waldo. But who else or what else is in the picture? We don't get to look at the whole picture if someone or something immediately hands over the goal of our quest. The editors and staff are thinking about the next set of electronic tools, those that can provide a variety of organizational schemes, including ones specific to the needs and interests of individual subscribers or readers. What do you want to read first (or ever)? How do you know what you want to read first? (Or do you even know?) The new opportunities of digital distribution will certainly include alerts and “feeds”, multiple and varying tables of content, and new sorts of prompts. (As an example, think of this adaptation of a familiar phrase: “People who read this article also read ...”.) We come to these times with an open mind and a willingness to explore. We encourage you to embrace the changes with us. Now if only I could remember the translation for “train station” and the musician under whose name my media player stored the other half of the album. Norbert J. Pienta Editor in Chief
Literature Cited 1. Computer-Based Chemical Information; Arnett, E. M., Kent, A., Eds.; Marcel Dekker: New York, 1973.
Norbert J. Pienta is a professor in the Department of Chemistry, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242-1294; norbert-pienta@ jce.acs.org.
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r 2010 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc. pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc Vol. 87 No. 7 July 2010 10.1021/ed100412u Published on Web 05/27/2010
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Journal of Chemical Education
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