For the later half of the twentieth century, Kirk‐Othmer has been the standard encyclopedia for chemical engineering. It is routinely included in literature guides, best reference book lists, etc. This acclaim is not unfounded. Kirk‐Othmer has provided generations of students with a source of long introductory essays about a wide range of topics in chemical engineering. Articles provide ample cited references, occasional diagrams, tables and images and generally include subheadings within the long articles. Wiley's promotional material suggests that this work is aimed at “professionals who wish to learn about technologically important materials, established as well as cutting edge methods, and relevant phenomena”. But the articles are better suited for upper‐undergraduates, beginning graduate students or individuals from neighbouring fields who need an overview or a starting place for a chemical engineering subject. This work is updated with a few new articles monthly and some of the references included in this work date into the mid decade, but like most encyclopedia's it is hardly “cutting edge”.
Wiley's online reference works are fairly easy to use and are both searchable and browsable. The interface used can act as an open URL source database, thereby allowing a library to easily track down the references found in the encyclopedia. It can be ordered by subscription or “one time order pricing”; both are based on the full time equivalent user population and type of library.
Despite Kirk‐Othmer's many praiseworthy qualities, my experience as a science and engineering librarian in both academic research libraries and a corporate chemical engineering library has left me with a strong preference for another chemical engineering encyclopedia, Ullmann's Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry. Ullmann's is also published online by Wiley Interscience. It has been much more useful in this reviewer's duties as a reference librarian with undergraduates, graduate students and researchers, often answering questions for these library users where Kirk‐Othmer did not readily tackle. It is important to acknowledge that this experience was based on access to the print Kirk‐Othmer, not the online product which is being reviewed here, while Ullmann's was used by the reviewer in print format and then later in the online version.
Ullmann's has been more useful in part because it offers greater access to its content. It has a highly subdivided format for what would otherwise be long articles and creates a more structured browseable and searchable reference work. This was especially true when comparing the two works in print, but this difference is not so pronounced in the online environment. Simply put Ullmann's has a greater variety of topics, but it is important to note that Ullmann's treatment of each topic is typically briefer than Kirk‐Othmer, often requiring the reader to refer to the references to obtain much of the information that might be available.
The Kirk‐Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology will be a useful reference source for libraries serving undergraduate and graduate programmes in chemical engineering or chemistry, but for graduate programmes and special libraries Ullmann's Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry may be more worthwhile.
