Library Resources on Chemistry

• Scope
• Subject Searching in the Voyager Catalog
• Electronic Books
• Finding Books in Mainland Libraries
• Reference Books
• Encyclopedias
• Dictionaries
• Dissertations
• Journals and Indexes
• Standards
• Calculators
• Writing in Chemistry
• Chemistry Directories Online
• Chemistry Organizations
• Mailing Lists / Discussion Groups
• Additional Internet Resources

SCOPE

Chemistry is the science that deals with the properties, composition, and structure of substances (defined as elements and compounds), the transformations they undergo, and the energy that is released or absorbed during these processes. Every substance, whether naturally occurring or artificially produced, consists of one or more of the hundred-odd species of atoms that have been identified as elements. Although these atoms, in turn, are composed of more elementary particles, they are the basic building blocks of chemical substances; there is no quantity of oxygen, mercury, or gold, for example, smaller than an atom of that substance. Chemistry, therefore, is concerned not with the subatomic domain but with the properties of atoms and the laws governing their combinations and how the knowledge of these properties can be used to achieve specific purposes.

Chemistry also is concerned with the utilization of natural substances and the creation of artificial ones. Cooking, fermentation, glass making, and metallurgy are all chemical processes that date from the beginnings of civilization. Today, vinyl, Teflon, liquid crystals, semiconductors, and superconductors represent the fruits of chemical technology. The 20th century has seen dramatic advances in the comprehension of the marvelous and complex chemistry of living organisms, and a molecular interpretation of health and disease holds great promise. Modern chemistry, aided by increasingly sophisticated instruments, studies materials as small as single atoms and as large and complex as DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), which contains millions of atoms. New substances can even be designed to bear desired characteristics and then synthesized. The rate at which chemical knowledge continues to accumulate is remarkable. Over time more than 8,000,000 different chemical substances, both natural and artificial, have been characterized and produced. The number was less than 500,000 as recently as 1965.

Chemistry. (2006).  In Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved December 8, 2006, from Encyclopaedia Britannica Online.

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SUBJECT SEARCHING IN THE VOYAGER CATALOG

Books and media on all subjects are indexed in UH Hilo’s Voyager catalog.

A click on the links below will perform the search in UH Hilo’s catalog. Subject headings used by the library, under which books on chemistry can be located in most card, book, and online catalogs, include the following:

Chemistry will retrieve books and media on chemistry in general as well as more specific aspects of the subject.

The following terms also bring up many titles relevant to chemistry:

Biochemistry
Chemical industry
Chemical reaction
Chemical oceanography
Chemistry, Agricultural
Chemistry, Analytic
Chemistry, Clinical
Chemistry, Inorganic
Chemistry, Organic
Chemistry, Pharmaceutical
Chemistry, Physical
Neurochemistry
Protein

Use Hawai’i Voyager (the library’s online catalog) to search for books in the library collection. From the library's homepage, use the UH - Hilo Basic Search or the UH Hilo - Advanced Search to search by Author, Subject, Title, or Keyword. You can also Search all UH System Libraries and request items from other libraries.

Finding Chemistry Books to Check Out

Books related to chemistry may be found in a number of areas within the library, which uses the Library of Congress call number scheme to put its books in order by subject.

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ELECTRONIC BOOKS

The library has recently acquired electronic books to supplement its printed collection. These are especially useful for students who are not on campus. EBooks are accessed from the library homepage. Under the column entitled “Quick Links,” click on “eBooks.”

NCBI Bookshelf
The Bookshelf is a growing collection of biomedical books that can be searched directly by typing a concept into the textbox above and selecting "Go".

NetLibrary contains books on all subjects and includes some titles on chemistry. Some of these are cataloged in Voyager, but most must be accessed from the netLibrary website.

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FINDING BOOKS IN MAINLAND LIBRARIES

WorldCat lists books, audiovisual materials, and other items held by some 18,000 libraries worldwide. Its 1.3 billion items may be searched by author, keyword, title, and ISBN.

Once you have found a title you're interested in, you need to check our library's Voyager catalog to see if we have the book.

If you’re interested in a title that is not held by UH Hilo or any other library in the UH system, you may ask us to try to obtain it via interlibrary loan. Please be aware that it can take from three to five weeks for such books to arrive here. For more information and instructions on requesting material from other libraries, please click here.

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REFERENCE BOOKS

Chemistry: foundations and applications. J. J. Lagowski, editor in chief.
Publisher: New York: Macmillan Reference USA, c2004.
Reference QD 31.2 .C41 2004

Dean’s analytical chemistry handbook. Pradyot Patnaik.
Reference QD 78 .P37 2004

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ENCYCLOPEDIAS

Van Nostrand’s encyclopedia of chemistry. 5th ed. / edited by Glenn D. Considine.
Reference QD 4 .V36 2005

Encyclopedia of inorganic chemistry. Editor-in-chief R. Bruce King.
Edition: 2nd ed.  Publisher: New York : Wiley, c2005.
Reference QD 148 .E53 2005

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DICTIONARIES

Hawley’s condensed chemical dictionary / revised by Richard J. Lewis, Sr. 14th ed.
Publisher: New York : Wiley, c2001.
Reference  QD5 .C5 2001

The Facts on File dictionary of chemistry. Variant Title: Dictionary of chemistry
Edition: 3rd ed. / edited by John Daintith.  Publisher: New York : Checkmark Books, c1999.
Reference QD5 .F33 1999

Dictionary of Organic Compounds

Chemistry and Environmental Dictionary

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DISSERTATIONS

The library has access to the full text of North American theses and dissertations completed since 1997 in Digital Dissertations. Some examples of material available in full text on that site:

Farrenkopf, Anna Marie, PhD. (2000). Iodine speciation at the Hawaii Ocean Time-series station ALOHA and in the Arabian Sea. (University of Delaware, 2000).

Jaquess, Amy Beth, PhD. (1991).  The role ofpH, soil type, organic matter content, and non-microbial reactions on pesticide degradation in surface and vadose zone California and Hawaii soils. (University of California, Davis, 1991)

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JOURNALS and INDEXES

Current issues of print periodicals are displayed on the Main Level behind the Reference area, arranged in broad subject areas. Most of our periodical backfiles are on the Lower Level (temporarily during renovation), shelved alphabetically by title.

In order to find articles in periodicals on a specific topic, use one or more of the library's periodical indexes. Online indexes of most value in chemistry are:

PubMed / MEDLINE, available via the NCBI Entrez retrieval system, was developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), located at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).  Entrez is the text-based search and retrieval system used at NCBI for services including PubMed, Nucleotide and Protein Sequences, Protein Structures, Complete Genomes, Taxonomy, OMIM, and many others.  PubMed provides access to citations from biomedical literature. LinkOut provides access to full-text articles at our library web site, journal Web sites, and other related Web resources. PubMed also provides access and links to the other Entrez molecular biology resources.

American Chemical Society Journals: Indexes and full text of 28 journals published by the ACS

Science Direct: Electronic journals published by Elsevier and Academic Press back to 1995. Covers all sciences, arts and humanities, business and economics, environment and energy, medicine and pharmacology, psychology and other social sciences.

SpringerLink: Over 350 electronic journals published by Springer and an additional 650 published by Kluwer. Access to articles published after 1996.

Blackwell Science, Technology, and Medicine Collection: Approximately 375 peer-reviewed journals in full text. Part of the Blackwell Synergy electronic journal database, the titles marked with a green spot are the science journals available to our library.

LexisNexis Academic
Click on “Business” then “industry and market”, then from the pull-down menu select "Chemicals, Plastics and Rubber News" (or "Pharmaceuticals and Cosmetics News"), then enter the name of the chemical or substance of interest in the "Topic" search box. Select a date range to search, then click on the "Search" button. Adding price as a keyword in the "Additional Terms" search box may increase the specificity of your results.

Wiley InterScience - Almost 400 electronic journals in the sciences and social sciences back to 1997 (where available).

Hazardous Substances Data Bank
HSDB is a toxicology data file on the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) Toxicology Data Network (TOXNET®). It focuses on the toxicology of potentially hazardous chemicals. It is enhanced with information on human exposure, industrial hygiene, and emergency handling procedures, environmental fate, regulatory requirements, and related areas. All data are referenced and derived from a core set of books, government documents, technical reports, and selected primary journal literature. HSDB is peer-reviewed by the Scientific Review Panel (SRP), a committee of experts in the major subject areas within the data bank's scope. HSDB is organized into individual chemical records, and contains over 4800 such records.

Finding Articles in Print and Online

The vast majority of journals we have available are now online. In order to find out if we have access to a journal, either in print format or online, use the “Find Periodicals” box on the library’s homepage. Type in the title of the journal (not the title of the article within the journal).

If we have it online, a link will be provided to the journals homepage, from which you may find the specific issue and article you’re looking for. If we have the journal in print format, the system will take you to the Voyager catalog record for the journal. It will tell you what years we have, and most likely will tell you we keep the journal in the Periodical Backfile Collection on the Upper Level of the Library.

Browsing the Journals We Have Available in Chemistry

If you would like to see what chemistry journals we have access to, you may do so from the “Find Articles” page of the library’s website.

Obtaining Articles from Journals the Library Does Not Have

For information and instructions on requesting material from other libraries, please see the Loans from Other Libraries page.

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STANDARDS

Chemical Engineering Standards
From the University of Florida Chemical Engineering Department: Standards relevant to chemical and process engineering.

Scientific Standards Information
From the University of Virginia Library: This page contains links to Web resources dealing with scientific and other standards, as well as to the home pages of national and international standards organizations.

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CALCULATORS

Martindale’s Calculator On-line Center Chemistry

Molinspiration:  Calculation of Molecular Properties and Drug-likeness

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WRITING IN CHEMISTRY

The ACS style guide: a manual for authors and editors / Janet S. Dodd, editor.
Publisher: Washington, DC : American Chemical Society.
Reference Call Number: QD8.5 .A25 2006

The art of scientific writing : from student reports to professional publications in chemistry and related fields / Hans F. Ebel, Claus Bliefert, William E. Russey. 2nd, completely rev. ed. Publisher: Weinheim : Wiley-VCH, c2004.
General Collection  QD9.15 .E23 2004

Lipson, Charles. Doing honest work in college: how to prepare citations, avoid plagiarism, and achieve real academic success. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2004. 
General Collection  PN171.F56 L56 2004
 
ACS Reference Style Guidelines

ACS Guidelines for Documenting Sources

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CHEMISTRY DIRECTORIES ONLINE

Directories provide organized access, generally by subject, to a particular set of Internet resources:

Yahoo! Chemistry
A directory of resources covering a wide range of chemistry subject areas.

Google Chemistry Directory
A directory of resources covering a wide range of chemistry subject areas.

Science.gov: A gateway to authoritative selected science information provided by U.S. Government agencies, including research and development results.

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CHEMISTRY ORGANIZATIONS

American Chemical Society
Contains news and events, links to ACS member information, the molecule of the week, information on ACS meetings and more.

Chemical Heritage Foundation
Offers many tools for the researcher, the student, and those who want to explore and discover how the chemical and molecular sciences have changed the world in which we live.

Yahoo Directory Chemistry Organization

Google Directory Clinical and Medicinal Chemistry

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MAILING LISTS / DISCUSSION GROUPS

FDA Library of Chemistry Listservs

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ADDITIONAL INTERNET RESOURCES

National Library of Medicine PubChem
PubChem provides information on the biological activities of small molecules. It is a component of NIH's Molecular Libraries Roadmap Initiative. PubChem includes substance information, compound structures, and bioactivity data in three primary databases, PCSubstance, PCCompound, and PCBioAssay, respectively.

WebElements Periodic Table of Elements.
This site provides general, chemical, physical, nuclear, electronic, biological, and geological properties, plus crystallographic data, reduction potentials, isotope abundances, electronic configurations, and ionization enthalpies for the first 112 elements. Source: The University of Sheffield and WebElements Ltd, UK.

ChemExper Chemical Directory
The goal of this project is to realise a common and freely accessible database over the internet. This database contains chemical products with their physical characteristics. Everybody can submit chemical information using Expereact WEB and retrieve information from the ChemExper's WEB page.

ChemSpy.com
Provides a one stop shop for a wide range of search tools for chemistry professionals, students, and educators, looking for chemistry news, resources, databases, acronyms, definitions, and chemical industry information. Click for the ChemSpy chemical searching newsfeed.

What Every Chemist Should Know about Patents
This booklet covers the basics of patent law, with a US slant. Although it was written by chemists, for chemists, it is really for anyone working in industry or academia. It is provided as a PDF file, and downloading for non-commercial use is encouraged. Source: written for the ACS Joint Board-Council Committee on Patents and Related Matters.

NIST Photoelectron Spectroscopy Database gives easy access to the energies of many photoelectron and Auger-electron spectral lines. A highly interactive program allows the user to search by element, line type, line energy, and many other variables.  Users can easily identify unknown measured lines by matching to previous measurements.

FDA Library of Chemistry Information

EPA Substance Registry

Hazardous Chemical Database

R&D Chemicals "A database of rare chemicals searchable for free using a chemist-friendly search engine."

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