A small-scale adiabatic calorimeter has been constructed as part of a larger project to study the thermodynamics of nanomaterials and to facilitate heat capacity measurements on samples of insufficient quantity to run on our current large-scale adiabatic apparatus. This calorimeter is designed to measure the heat capacity of samples whose volume is less than 0.8 cm(3) over a temperature range of T = 13 K to T = 350 K. Heat capacity results on copper, sapphire, and benzoic acid show the accuracy of the measurements to be better than +/- 0.4% for temperatures higher than T = 50 K. The reproducibility of these measurements is generally better than +/- 0.25%. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.