This is a five‐volume encyclopedia. Individual volumes are:
- 1.
Domestic, Municipal, and Industrial Water Supply and Waste Disposal;
- 2.
Water Quality and Resource Development;
- 3.
Surface and Agricultural Water;
- 4.
Oceanography; Meteorology; Physics and Chemistry; Water Law and Water History, Art and Culture; and
- 5.
Ground Water.
Reference Reviews was sent the final volume for review. The volumes are separately sold for £200 each.
As you might guess from previous reviews, I first looked up caves. These are mentioned in the index and this volume has a good account of Karst topography; there is also an index reference to cave formation in the fourth volume. Fossil aquifers are another topic that interests me. The account here is good and ends with a point not always made that, apart from their heritage and hydrological interest, the real concern is that they will suddenly run out. Looking for a more substantial article I opened the book at random on to a double spread of references. These were two of nearly four pages of reading supporting a 12‐page article on Microbial Processes Affecting Monitored Natural Attenuation of Contaminates in the Subsurface. The article starts from the US Environment Protection Agency document about monitoring natural attenuation and discusses the problem, the methods of monitoring and some of the chemistry of attenuation. The standards for levels of chlorinated solvents and petroleum are cited and a contact telephone number is given for the lead author who works for EPA. The sources, problems, and remediation of heavy metal contamination get a similar length of treatment although the topic is dealt with in several places. There is also an article on the genetics of heavy metal tolerance and accumulation by higher plants; something that is relevant to other environmental problems such as the grassing over of mining‐spoil. Thus, on a very small selection I hope to have shown that the volume covers the expected range of topics and also has a substantial amount of information and practical advice on areas of water management.
Having dealt with the volume to hand I will comment briefly on the other four volumes. Volume 1 immediately gets my recommendation because it mentions waste disposal in the title. Water supply is becoming a major world problem, but once a reasonably large community gets water getting rid of the waste becomes the issue. The second volume covers aspects of processing water, including pollution and microbial contamination. The third covers the use of water in agriculture and other aspects of surface water such as flooding and surface hydrology. The fourth volume covers those aspects that do not easily fit elsewhere. I failed to find any index terms to religion or myth; I would have expected this as a cultural topic, but as there are articles on tribal people and historic cultures, and article on legal issues, some of this may be covered.
The fifth volume to hand and, I assume, the other four volumes have plenty of pictures, tables, diagrams and maps. There is quite a lot of mathematics in those sections about quantitative topics in volume 5, and I expect that volumes 1 and 2 will be the same. The text is in two columns with article and subsections titled in slightly larger bold type. The covers are plain blue with the set title and editors in pale blue and the volume title in white. There is no thematic listing and no cross‐referencing. The sections are ordered in a more or less alphabetical arrangement but articles are shuffled so related topic such as the ones on contaminants are brought together. In other words, the design is simple and there is little help beyond the index. Each volume has its own index and these are cumulated in the final volume. The volume index has about 2,500 main headings and the cumulative index runs to 36 pages. One great point of the design is that the individual volumes are the US paper size that is almost A4 and about one and a half inches thick which means that they are easy to handle
The editors, in a brief preface, recommend the encyclopedia to those professionally involved in water management and to those interested in the topic. For the latter they have included articles on peripheral subjects such, as in this volume, Qanats, an ancient Persian method of water collection still in use in modern Iran.
I have reviewed several water related encyclopedias and I will take two to contrast with this set. Dasch (2003) (RR 2004/153) is also multi‐volume set that has lots of using aids and cross‐references and is very attractively laid out. Stewart and Howell (2003) (RR 2004/267) cover in a large volume the subject matter of about half to three quarters the contents of this encyclopedia's third volume. It had very few aids to use and lacked a full index. This set lies between these two examples. Dasch is ideal for public libraries and school up to late teenage. Stewart and Howell is very specific and will only appeal to those who share the specific editorial interests in agriculture and, particularly, arid land agriculture. If you have wide interests in water and need a rigorous mathematical treatment then this mew set or, maybe, just some of the volumes, would be valuable. So, universities, water utility companies, government departments and civil engineers are among the possible markets for the encyclopedia.
