The Journal of Chemical Education is the journal of the Division of Chemical Education, Inc. of the American Chemical Society. Published continuously since 1924, JCE is the world's premier chemical education journal. Our mission is to help chemistry teachers stay current with research advances as well as share new ideas in teaching methodologies and course organization. A multimedia publisher, JCE welcomes materials in print, software, video, and other digital formats.
For more details see About
JCE
In 2002, JCE was awarded an NSF grant to create the JCE Digital Library (JCE DLib), which will initially consist of the following collections:
Ultimately our goal is to include the entire Journal, plus other chemical eduation resources.
We put together a document to define the Dublin Core values for JCE-DLib
Most of the values were easily identified. For the Subject element, we could have used our existing JCE keyword list. However, we felt that this was an oppurtune time to revise our keywords.
Initially we considered, and rejected, existing controlled vocabularies. For example, the canonical reference in chemistry is of course Chemical Abstract Services, which indexes all chemistry journals. However, this is far too detailed (two very large volumes, 3099 pages) for our purposes.Our conclusion was that we needed a vocabulary suited to our own focus on chemical education.
The keywords play an important throughout the editorial process.
One of the requirements for our list is that it be short enough to be easily navigated (or current list is 168 terms), because we rely heavily on our authors to make the initial keyword assignment. And we depend on keywords for a number of editorial operations, such as assigning reviewers, and organizing 'theme' issues.
In addition, there was a strong feeling that each of the current terms be included in the new list, either as a synonym or possibly a broader term.
In order to revise our keywords, we decided to take advantage of our extensive collection of Journal reviewers. We collected a large number of chemistry terms into a database, and developed a web interface to allow reviewers to comment on the merits of each term. The terms were collected from various sources, including textbooks.The terms were organized hierarchically, but this turned out to be not as useful as originally hoped.
The terms were managed with a database-driven web interface, using an AMP system (Apache, MySQL, PHP).
The list was narrowed by selecting the most important terms from the review, further filtered by the Journal's editorial preferences (biases?).
We introduced a new organization for the keywords. The current list classifies terms as 'General Categories' and 'Specific Categories'. The new list classifieds terms into the following categories: Audience (corresponding to the Dublin Core audience element); and Domain, Topic, Pedagogy, and Element (corresponding to the Dublin Core subject element).
The syntax was simplified and formalized, eliminating the hyphen/em-dash confusion, and using only the forward slash for compound terms.
At the same time, we began cataloging older Journal articles, many of which were lacking any keywords. This has helped us clarify the definition and scope of each term.
In order to clarify the use of the terms, each of the terms was given a definition and scope.
The complete list of 319 terms can be browsed through our web interface: