Preface

Welcome to Short Stories in Instrumental Analysis!

This book is a short primer on core topics in instrumental analytical chemistry.  It covers both fundamental and technical aspects of optical molecular and elemental spectroscopies, vibrational spectroscopies, voltammetry, chromatography, and mass spectrometry. Such knowledge is a highly employable attribute for positions in industry, service and research labs, and regulatory agencies.

Short Stories in Analytical Chemistry was specially developed for the third-year undergraduate course in instrumental analytical chemistry at the University of British Columbia. Nonetheless, it aspires to be general enough to be useful for similar courses at other institutions. The book is an open-access resource that is intended to replace a conventional textbook that features many hundreds of pages.

The objectives in developing the book were three-fold:

• To eliminate a significant educational expense for students, particularly when hundreds of pages in a textbook tend to go unused in a course;

• To avoid intimidating and overwhelming students with reams of information;

• To make pre-reading in advance of a classroom lecture more efficient,  more frequent, and more consistent with the contemporary “bite size” consumption of information.

To meet these objectives, the book is written to be concise. Each chapter is not meant to stand alone as a full treatment of a topic. Rather, each chapter is a primer for a full treatment delivered by an instructor with the help of supplemental notes or slides. Nevertheless, the book remains useful as a study resource and as a post-course refresher on instrumental analytical chemistry.

The original iteration of the book was made available as a PDF document, where each chapter fit on a single letter-sized page. As the book was revised and ported to an e-book format, the one-page motif was replaced with a count of 500–750 words for the main content of a chapter. Each chapter can thus be read, even at a typical learning pace, in 5–10 minutes.

Each chapter is supplemented with three post-reading learning aids:

• A bulleted list of connections between the current topic and past and future topics. This list helps students recognize recurring themes and concepts, and view the course topics as linked rather than siloed.

• Post-reading questions to help students self-test recall and comprehension of the chapter content. Answers to the questions are found at the end of the book.

• A list of topic learning objectives. Although some of the learning objectives are addressed in each chapter, this list is, in large part, a preview of what an instructor will cover and emphasize during a classroom lecture. Again, effort was made to write these learning objectives to be general enough to fit many personalized versions of an instrumental analytical chemistry course.