The Safety “Use Case”: Co-Developing Chemical Information Management and Laboratory Safety Skills

The 2015 edition of the American Chemical Society’s Guidelines and Evaluation Procedures for Bachelor’s Degree Programs identifies six skill sets that undergraduate chemistry programs should instill in their students. In our roles as support staff for chemistry departments at two different institutions (one a Primarily Undergraduate Institution, the other a research intensive university), we have been collaboratively studying these requirements and have found significant synergies between two in particular: “Chemical Literature and Information Management Skills” and “Laboratory Safety Skills”. We believe that by integrating emerging tools in the laboratory safety field into information literacy frameworks, a strong foundation can be established for the development of all the skills called out by the ACS. This article describes this strategy and provides examples of how these concepts can be implemented in both the chemistry teaching and research laboratory settings.