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Chemistry

Chemistry shelf. Pierre Antoine Tardieu, Aparicio el menor, 1804.

© BnF

The Reference library offers open-access information journals in French and English, together with a collection of around 3,000 books: introductory and summary works, for example on quantum chemistry and crystallography, dictionaries and encyclopedias, summary academic textbooks at bachelor’s and scientific preparatory course level, including a large amount of material on organic chemistry, and materials preparing students specifically for the “CAPES” and “agrégation” higher teaching qualifications.

The Reference library also holds guides on equipment and safety in chemistry laboratories and compendia of standards, including for example La Chimie : hygiène et sécurité, together with the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.

The Research library has an open-access collection of around 6,000 documents, including in particular the following:

• Series such as Organic Reactions (from issue 1, 1942), Comprehensive Analytical Chemistry by C.L. and D.W. Wilson (from issue 1, 1959), Structure and Bonding (from issue 1, 1966), and Reagents for Organic Synthesis by M. and L.F. Fieser (from issue 1, 1967); and treatises such as the Handbook of Nuclear Chemistry, the Handbook on the Physics and Chemistry of Rare Earths in 35 volumes, the Dechema Chemistry Data Series in 39 volumes, and Rodd’s Chemistry of Carbon Compounds in 74 volumes.
• Encyclopedias, both general and covering the various fields in organic and inorganic chemistry, spectrometry, catalysis, the science of surfaces, polymers, etc.
• Fundamental reference works: Beilstein, in almost 500 volumes, Houben-Weyl (which later became Science of Synthesis) in organic chemistry, and Gmelin in inorganic chemistry. These open-access collections are complemented by closed-stack collections, including, for example, more than 300 volumes for the Gmelin, as well as the first edition published in four volumes in German in 1827.
• A large number of works covering applied chemistry (chemical technologies) and environmental chemistry (“green chemistry”).
• A selection of international journals, including the most important journals in the various fields of chemistry, available on paper in the reading room or in electronic versions.

Readers can also consult closed-stack materials in the Research library, such as N. Lemery’s Cours de chymie (1675), a thesis by F. Joliot-Curie (1935 Nobel prize winner), and French learned journals such as the Bulletin de la Société chimique de France.

Certain particularly valuable documents, such as Lavoisier’s Traité élémentaire de chimie (1789 edition) and Le fluor et ses composés by Henri Moissan (the first French winner of the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1906), are held in the Rare Books Reserve (Réserve des livres rares).