Chemical Education Today edited by
Book & Media Reviews
Chemistry Resources in the Electronic Age by Judith A. Bazler Greenwood Press: Westport, CT, 2003. 312 pp. ISBN 157356379X. $49.95 reviewed by Robert Cole and Wheeler Conover
There are two important inanimate objects that are flexible enough to be considered living and breathing: the American Constitution and the Internet. Therefore, how can one write a book about Web resources, thereby making it a fixed source? That is the question Judith Bazler presents to the public in Chemistry Resources in the Electronic Age, a collection of Web site addresses on main resource topics ranging (in alphabetical order) from acids–bases to thermodynamics. There are collections of addresses for scientific supply houses, careers, and education programs for all ages. How did she collect the information for this book? The same way that most of us would collect it—typing phrases into search engines and then evaluating what came up. She even lists her and her graduate students’ favorite search engines. There is also a page that one can construct to evaluate the usefulness of a Web site, as the back cover states “Yet the Web is notoriously unreliable.” So, how did she and her army of graduate students do?
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Journal of Chemical Education
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Jeffrey Kovac University of Tennessee Knoxville, TN 37996-1600
In our opinion, she produced a book that isn’t worth the $49.95 price tag. Several links that were mentioned were dead; several sites that were not recommended were listed. Why would an author mention a Web site only to not recommend it? Some sites had a file extension that could not be found in the Windows XP cadre of extensions; some use media players that were unknown to us even after searching. The most important question that came to us during the evaluation of the book is: “Can I look in a search engine faster than I can look at the book, or can I look at the book faster than I can look in a search engine?” Our answer is definitely the former; and it is cheaper as well. This book is targeted toward a professional chemist or a teacher. It would be nice to separate the resources for practitioners and students; for example, what sixth grader needs to prepare a lesson plan? Many chemistry texts produce ancillary materials that assist students with the very same topics that Bazler covers in this book, including Web sites that are sometimes integrated into course-management systems for Web-assisted instruction. In our opinion, Bazler needs to pick up on the Three Rs of Book Authoring: Revise, Reorganize, and (most of all) Reevaluate. This is a book that will quickly find itself at a used book reseller because of its timeliness (or lack thereof ). Neither of us will put it on our shelf. Robert Cole and Wheeler Conover teach at Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College, 700 College Road, Cumberland, KY 40823-1099;
[email protected] Vol. 81 No. 7 July 2004
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www.JCE.DivCHED.org
