* That would take us to 2024. But in 1974, when Dr Adler was speaking, something else had just been born: the first node of the Internet.
* The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs (William Heinemann, 2005).
V
VALEDICTORY
In 1994 Kenneth F. Kister, a reference book enthusiast in Tampa, Florida, published the second edition of Kister’s Best Encyclopedias. It was, almost inevitably, a 500-page single-volume encyclopaedia itself, and covered the big general encyclopaedias alongside medium-sized encyclopaedias and small encyclopaedias, as well as children’s encyclopaedias and specialist encyclopaedias on the decorative arts, engineering and childcare. There was even a small section on the leading encyclopaedias in China, Japan, Korea, Spain and Russia. (In Russia there was only one, Bol’shavia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, or Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, not entirely the work of the Central Committee, but certainly a publication with a Marxist–Leninist bias, with, for example, the American Declaration of Independence derided as the product of a disastrous bourgeois revolution.)
Among Japanese sets, Kenneth F. Kister singles out the ‘serviceable’ single-volume Daijiten Desuku (Tokyo, 1983) and the ‘well-edited, handsomely illustrated’ twenty-three-volume Dai-Nixon Hakka Jitendra (Tokyo, 1973). Among Korean-language volumes, Kister notes that when a translated Britannica appeared with added Korean-interest articles in 1992, its publishers in Seoul had an optimistic message. They had taken ‘great pains to cover North Korean topics in a realistic manner. In this way the editors have made their own contribution to realising a unified Korea.’ Nothing if not ambitious.
Kister’s exhaustive survey was timely in a way he couldn’t have known when he began. The mid-1990s marked a long slow funeral for the print encyclopaedias that occupied nine-tenths of his report. The CD-ROM was taking over, and not long after that most people would have some sort of dial-up online service provider, and his guide swiftly came to resemble the passenger list on the Titanic.*
But what a list, and what a story was winding down. He mentions many briefly popular volumes from the 1950s and ’60s, the heyday of small-scale editions produced by established publishing houses eager for a slice. The Macmillan Family Encyclopedia, Webster’s Family Encyclopedia, Barnes & Noble Encyclopedia, Random House Encyclopedia, many of them with student or children’s versions.
Kister’s tone is as generous as his analysis is bland. ‘Information in Funk & Wagnalls is normally reliable and presented in an impartial manner,’ he declares. The Grolier Encyclopedia of Knowledge, a slightly reduced version of the standard Grolier Academic American produced primarily for sale in supermarkets, was praised for its ‘broad and carefully balanced coverage, accurate and impartial presentation of material, sound organization and effective access to specific topics and facts, first-rate illustrations, impeccable authority’. In other words, like the vast majority of publications under consideration, it was a good encyclopaedia, or, at the very worst, good for its intended market.
What made Kister’s interesting were his comparison tables, in which he rated one publication next to another in terms of number of words, pages and illustrations, and then cross-references, index entries and price. Each encyclopaedia was then assigned a grade, with A being ‘excellent’ and D ‘below average’. In the fourteen medium-sized adult encyclopaedias under consideration, eleven were either A or B, with one C and two Ds. Prospective purchasers were encouraged not to base their judgement purely on the grades, ‘which are necessarily arbitrary’.
Equally arbitrary were the ‘report cards’ he assigned according to the treatment of various topics. For the medium-sized publications he took a list of ten subjects, including Computers, Halloween, Magic Johnson, Measles, Nuclear Energy and Sex Education, and gave each a grade for Coverage, Accuracy, Clarity and ‘Recency’. In Compton’s, almost every topic got an A in every category, although Computers and Nuclear Energy only got a C for Clarity. For the large adult comparison between Britannica, Americana and Collier’s, Kister reshuffled his subject list, now selecting topics including Philip Glass and the Shroud of Turin. The best overall performance was judged to be Collier’s with As across the board, followed by Americana with only a little slippage when it came to Galileo, and lastly there was Britannica, which let itself down with poor Recency when it came to both Circumcision and Heart Disease.
Who was Mr Kister to conduct such a guide? He billed himself as ‘North America’s best known reviewer of information materials’, although this in itself must have been hard to quantify. As well as encyclopaedias, he had written comprehensive guides to atlases and dictionaries, and he held a master’s in library science from the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science in Boston.
Kister was also the new Laurance Hart. Beginning in 1929, and for the next thirty-five years, Hart had published his ‘Comparison of Encyclopedias’, known universally as The Hart Chart. This was a sheet measuring 17 by 11 inches sent every six months from his home in New Jersey at a cost of 35 cents for the first sheet and then 15 cents thereafter. Each sheet contained eleven tables, some of them primitive in their appraisaclass="underline" he measured both ‘price per 100 pages’ and ‘price per million words’, thus penalising elegant typography and good editing. His obituaries in at least two library journals praised the role his work played in raising standards in reference works and simplifying the work of acquisition.
A few years later, librarians would be faced with other, less familiar, choices. In June 1998, at the Annual Conference of the American Library Association in Washington DC, one of the topics concerned the future of digital encyclopaedias. Specifically, members were concerned with how confusing this new world could be, and how fast this landscape was changing. They wanted to know where to invest their energies and budget.
James Rettig, a librarian at the University of Richmond, Virginia, presented a conference paper marking this radical transformation over the last fifteen years. It started, he said, with the ‘simple porting over of imageless ASCII text to pre-Web online systems’, but then things got complicated.
Then we had text-only CD-ROM encyclopedias, followed by text and-still-image encyclopedias, followed by text-still-image sound-and-video CD-ROM encyclopedias, followed by text-still image-sound-and-video CD-ROM encyclopedias including simulations and animations, followed by text-still image-sound-and-video CD-ROM encyclopedias including simulations and animations and links to Web sites, followed, of course, by online interactive encyclopedias combining all of the above.
The field now resembled a forest of wires at the back of an early computer. Amid the confusion, mistakes could be costly: early CD-ROMs cost hundreds of dollars. Library users would all want the latest and most exciting versions, but when would the technology reach its zenith? The answer, of course was ‘never’, but at some stage a decision had to be made. The confusion and mistakes could, of course, prove costlier still to the encyclopaedia makers themselves.