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This tutorial covers the CRC Handbook of Physics and Chemistry. CRC stands for Chemical Rubber
Company and we have this both in print and on-line.
This is the print version of the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. It is the 90th edition.
It is also known as the chemist’s Bible. It is housed in the East Campus Library Reference
area on the first floor of the East Campus Library. Being in reference means that it
cannot be checked out, so it should always be available at the ECL.
We are going to take a quick tour of how this book is organized. If you look at the side
you see these tabs. These are all the different sections of the book. It is a handbook, which
means it is full of data and this data has been harvested from journal articles and other
books and it’s been reprocessed and when it makes it to this stage it has generally
been accepted by the scientific community.
Let’s start at the Table of Contents. You’ll find several different sections and each section
restarts the numbering.
So if we look in more detail at Section 2: Symbols, Terminology, and Nomenclature, you’ll
see that it restarts in section two at page one.
Organic information is found in Section Three: Physical Constants of Organic Compounds. At
the start of each section it will tell you how to read the information in that section.
So if you are new to a section and you are unclear of how it is organized, flip to the
start of just that section for a brief introduction.
Once you are in this section, you can see the left hand page has all of the data and
the right hand page has the chemical structure.
This section is organized by chemical name. So in this composite picture you’ll see
that you can look up, by name, alphabetically, and it’s going to detail synonyms, molecular
formula. The CAS RN is the registry number; it’s a unique identifier for each chemical
structure. And you’ll also get molecular formula, melting point, boiling point, and
other information.
Generally the CRC has a lot of tabular data. So this page, flip to later in the book, contains
the enthalpy solution of electrolytes.
Here’s another example of date from the CRC. The picture details the arrangement of
metal ions in the Spinel structure. Remember if you get stuck in any section, go back to
the start of that section for a quick introduction.
At the back of the book you will find the index. It’s organized alphabetically.
If you look at an entry, take Apparent Equilibrium Constants for Enzyme-Catalyzed Reactions,
right here in the middle of the page. They are found in section 7, from pages 19 to 22.
So if you know specifically what you are looking for you can start at the index. Otherwise
your best bet would be starting at the Table of Contents at the front. Generally the CRC
is easier to search online, which we’ll detail in just a second. But sometimes it
is easier to navigate within the print, once you find the section you need. This concludes
the overview of the print version of the CRC. Next we will explore the online version.
The CRC Handbook Online has two primary ways of navigation. First, is using the Table of
Contents along the left hand side. The second is to use the basic text search in the upper
right hand corner.
If you use the text search, here we have searched for caffeine; you’ll see that the search
results are returned in the main body. There are two kinds of search results. The first,
basically the ones that are not the interactive tables, are PDF versions of the print book.
So it will take a little longer for it to load..
And here if you look, you’ll see the name, synonym, molecular formula, the registry number,
molecular weight, and physical form; just like you would in the print version. Then
you would just do a text search of the PDF as we have demonstrated in the upper right
hand corner.
The other result type is interactive tables. So if you click on that..
You’ll find they have extracted out just the information that you want. The reason
that this is interactive is that you can click on structure it will pop open in a new window
and give you the structure. That’s all the interactivity that there is for ones that
are just the basic physical constant. This ends the tutorial on the CRC handbook.