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 activity uses Gaussian with the WebMO interface to investigate the role of the metal in backbonding to CO as well as effects of the trans ligands. It can also be used as a way of introducing computational chemistry in an inorganic course.

This is a handout which I use in an advanced general chemistry course, but which could be used in an inorganic course as well. It is a mini-periodic table with common cations and their charge to size ratios expressed as Q/r², where Q is in integer charges (+1, +2), and r is in Angstroms. Conveniently, Na⁺ is an easy to remember 1.0, and Al³⁺ and Be²⁺ are easy to remember values of 10. This corresponds to the polarizing power of these ions, and is a crude proxy for how covalent their interactions with a given anion tend to be.

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.