Ullmann’s Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry. CD-ROM. 6th Edition 1999 Electronic Release

When I was being trained in dyestuff research, development and production at Ciba-Geigy in 1994, my supervisors as senior dyestuff chemists, brought to my attention the Ullmann’s Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry. Clearly it is the standard reference for chemists and chemical engineers. I frequently used its fifth print edition. Now I am enjoying the sixth edition in electronic form - the whole Ullmann in one CD. The standard version comes along with a multi-user single-site network license; i.e., it can be accessed from anywhere within a local area computer network. I would like to recommend that all the chemistry libraries in academic institutes or companies should have a copy, even though its price is understandably high.

Readers may find the website on Ullmann's Encyclopedia [1] regarding this publication very useful.

First published in 1914 by Professor Fritz Ullmann in Berlin, Ullmanns Encyklopädie der technischen Chemie (as the German title reads) quickly became the standard reference work in industrial chemistry. Generations of chemists have since relied on Ullmann as their prime reference source. Further German editions followed in 1928–1932 and 1951–1970. The twenty-five volumes of the fourth edition, published in 1972–1984, were divided into an alphabetically ordered series of 18 volumes and a general series of six volumes which gave an account of the principles and methods of chemical engineering and process technology.

Ullmann’s Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry, Fifth Edition, was published from 1985 to 1996. This was the first edition published in the English language. By doing this, the publisher was able to offer an even better service to the international readership who already found the German editions of Ullmann invaluable. The printed version of the Fifth Edition comprises 28 alphabetically arranged volumes, 8 volumes on general aspects such as chemical engineering, industrial safety, and analytical methods, and a cumulative index volume with more than 80 000 carefully selected keywords. It also contains a German-English dictionary of technical terms. Altogether, the 37 volumes contain more than 800 major articles, written by almost 3000 authors who are experts in their fields, affiliated to leading chemical companies or research institutes, 10 000 tables, 20 000 figures, and innumerable references on 27 000 printed pages. In 1997, the complete Fifth Edition was made available on CD-ROM.

Since 1998, the sixth edition of Ullmann’s Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry has been published in electronic form to ensure greater convenience and topicality. With annual electronic releases, the encyclopedia will be updated and new articles will be added faster and in a more flexible manner than has been possible in a printed format. Furthermore, the electronic encyclopedia offers a number of attractive additional features due to a powerful retrieval software. It enables you to

• search for a word or phrase in the entire text
• use wildcards, Boolean operators, and proximity searching to expand the scope of the search and enhance the relevance of the results
• browse through articles
• follow cross-references via hyperlinks
• look up literature references
• print out entries
• copy text into your Word for Windows documents.

Complicated searches that may be time-consuming with printed books can now be performed in seconds. This is achieved by full 32-bit programming and by using a number of helpful indices, such as

• full text index
• author index
• CAS registry number index
• keyword index

with the possibility to enhance the relevance of the search results by confining the search to selected sections of the encyclopedia or of individual documents (e.g., tables or figure captions).

New in the 1999 release; about 70 articles have been revised, covering altogether more than 3000 printed pages. That's an update of 10% of the entire information! Look out for the REVISED 1999 remark on the title pages of these articles. Recent developments in the field are reflected by authoritative, brand-new review articles like ”Combinatorial Chemistry”, ”Fullerenes” (in: Carbon), ”High-Throughput Screening”, ”Metallocenes”, ”Microreactors”, ”Sonochemistry”, ”Sprayforming of Metals”, or ”Visualization Techniques” that are published in this release.