The journey starts

The minutes of the Officers’ meeting of the Analytical Chemistry Division (ACD) held in Beijing in November 2008 read “The officers discussed this issue [the lack of consistency of the 3^rd edition of the Orange Book] at their meeting in Beijing, based on a report from the Secretary [D B Hibbert], and came to the conclusion that ACD should go for a complete updating of the Orange Book. This demanding task will involve all the division members. In particular, all the Titular Members will be involved in the revision of the Orange Book, each taking the responsibility for a sub-project.” This was confirmed at the General Assembly in Glasgow in 2009. As Secretary, and about to become Vice President, President and then Past President, it was thought that the six years of senior office would be more than sufficient to complete the project. (Ha, ha!)

IUPAC Color Books

To remind us, in addition to Pure and Applied Chemistry Recommendations, IUPAC has been publishing its terminology and nomenclature work as books for many years. The earliest appears to be the first edition of the Red Book (Inorganic nomenclature) in 1958. In 1987 it was decided to bring together terminology into a single text, called the Gold Book, not because of the importance of the colour, but after Professor Victor Gold, Daniell Professor of Chemistry at King’s College London^[2]. The 1997 Gold Book was published as a series of pdfs ‘on-line’ in 2003, (https://old.iupac.org/publications/compendium/) and this gave the impetus for the xml Gold Book that became the signature version in 2006 until the latest ‘Web 3.0’ revision replaced it in 2019 (The IUPAC Compendium of Chemical Terminology, https://goldbook.iupac.org).

The first edition of the Orange Book was in 1977, and the 3^rd edition in 1997. An on-line version which could be downloaded as a hyperlinked pdf was published in 2009, the year the decision was made to embark on the 4^th edition [1].

Figure 1: Front cover of “Compendium of Terminology in Analytical Chemistry, 4th edn” – “the Orange Book.” https://iupac.org/what-we-do/books/orangebook/

The Orange Book to 2009

The First Edition was published in 1977 edited by the legendary H.M.N.H. Irving, H. Freiser and T.S. West. It was a collection of 23 reports published by IUPAC between 1960 and 1976. The Compendium was updated as the second edition in 1987 by the 11 reports published between 1976 and 1984.

Although mostly keeping the structure of the original editions, the 1997 third edition, edited by János Inczédy, was a major revision [2]. There were three new chapters: selections from the Green Book, [3] a chapter on quality assurance, and a chapter on applications. However, a report on the 3^rd edition wrote: “Unfortunately, the Orange Book does not have a consistent structure. Some chapters are written like a textbook while others have a glossary format. In some cases, an alphabetical order of the terms is maintained within each paragraph.” (ACD Teamwork, March 2009, from https://iupac.org/body/500). This was the issue, along with the eleven-year gap, that triggered the discussion in Beijing in 2008.

The ACD Officers meeting in Beijing in November 2008: President Ales Fajgelj (4th from right), Vice President Walter Lund (3rd from right), Past President Ryszard Lobinski (at left or 1st from right), and Secretary Brynn Hibbert (5th from right). Among the hosts is Zhifang Chai (6th from right).

Decisions, decisions

The overall stewardship of the project was given to me, but members of the Division Committee would be asked to look after particular chapters.

Having decided to more or less start from scratch with the 4^th edition, two further decisions had to be made. First, what was to be included—and more contentiously—excluded. We were amazed that, in fact, analytical chemistry had moved a long way since 1997. Whole new areas such as statistics and experimental design needed inclusion, and traditional fields of spectroscopy (particularly NMR) and chromatography had burgeoned. Very quickly it was decided to stick to the terminology of principles and methods, and not have applications (as was found in the 3^rd edition). There were simply not enough pages to include a sensible selection. So, in came a first chapter on fundamental metrology and a last chapter on modern quality assurance. This added to a new chapter on chemometrics.

Secondly, the preparation of an entire book from scratch that would contain definitive terminology would have been a review nightmare. We therefore decided that each chapter would be prepared as a PAC Recommendation. The idea was that then the accepted and fully-reviewed terms could be easily moved into the Orange Book. This was a good idea and eventually saved the project from falling in a heap, but the execution of the transfer turned out to be a bit more complicated than we hoped.

Table 2 gives the published Recommendations (and one Technical Report). Two were published as separate projects outside the Orange Book; mass spectrometry #7 and thermal methods #11. The remaining ten Recommendations appeared between 2016 and 2021.

Why did it take so long?

Zhifang Chai won the prize for being the first to submit his chapter on Radioanalytical methods to the Division in 2011. However, the Recommendation was not published until 2021, after some debate among different groups in the radioanalytical community. The first Recommendation actually published was Janusz Pawliszyn’s paper on sample extraction in 2016 (and a Technical Report to go with it), closely followed by the chemometrics Recommendation. The rest dribbled in over the next five years. We had three deaths of people leading chapter projects, including Paul De Bièvre, to whom the Orange Book is dedicated; one member of the Division committee (I shall not name him) totally withdrawing after several years of coming to meetings saying his chapter was nearly finished—any day soon; and a couple of chapters that lingered in the PAC editorial system perhaps a tad longer than necessary. With the impending completion of all Recommendations a contract was signed to deliver a manuscript to the RSC in 2021. This happened on April 1^st to be followed by a retraction because not all chapters had been appropriately reviewed. Careful and quick work by the Division, and an equally speedy and thorough, review by ICTNS, allowed a second submission of the manuscript on 19^th May 2022. There followed rounds of proofs and some discussion, with the final file sent to the publishers on 25^th October 2022. The Orange Book was published on 27^th January 2023.

So what took so long? Nothing really—this is how long these kinds of projects take.

Editors … and editors

It might be thought that the job of an editor is to collect the chapters, make sure they are sensible and bring them together in a nice order for publication. This turns out not to be the case for a Color Book. Even with a published Recommendation the order of terms might need amending, duplications (surprisingly many) must be resolved, introductions to chapters harmonized and finally an index of terms and symbols created. Learning a lot about writing terminologies, I found myself a co-author on eight Recommendations in addition to writing the Recommendation for Chapter 2, so here the title ‘editor’ covers a bit more than usual.

What next?

There is life after a Color Book—another Color Book. For me, it is working with Stuart Chalk on the massive Gold Book project. The Orange Book and its Recommendations came at a good time to try out the new Term Review System (TRS) for transporting entries into the Gold Book. This, like the Orange Book, will take as long as it takes, but when it is finished IUPAC will be the better for it, and will have fulfilled its mission to be “the world authority on chemical nomenclature and terminology.”

Acknowledgements

The list of 57 people who contributed to the Orange Book may be found in the front matter of the book. To this must be added the IUPAC secretariat and new friends in the RSC. Some have contributed more than others, and have been thanked, but the Orange Book was a team effort and the winner is IUPAC.

https://iupac.org/what-we-do/books/orangebook/

or https://doi.org/10.1039/9781788012881