The End of the Print Britannica

The company that publishes the Encyclopaedia Britannica announced on Tuesday that it will no longer offer a print edition of its venerable flagship work, according to an article in the Boston Globe. The Britannica is bowing to reality. After 244 years of publishing a print edition, the encyclopedia is becoming a digital-only publication. The reason is simple: "'The sales of printed encyclopedias have been neglible for several years ... We knew this was going to come,'" says Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. President Jorge Cauz. I have mixed feelings about this announcement.

My father was a Britannica author (he wrote the articles on purpura and other hematological disorders), and this was a source of enormous family pride--it signified that he was the world's expert. The Britannica could have chosen any specialist to write these articles, but they chose my dad. The print edition, in its specially-designed wooden bookcase, occupied a prominent place in our house, and it played a prominent role in my and my sister's education. It was the first place we turned when we had to write reports or get some background information.

I often use Wikipedia for background information but I prefer to verify its accuracy before relying on it. I know that Wikipedia offers some of the same information as the Britannica, but I do worry about who is vetting it. As the Globe points out, "Britannica has thousands of expert contributors from around the world, including Nobel laureates and world leaders ... It also has a staff of more than 100 editors." Wikipedia can't compete with that. On the other hand, as a librarian, I think that reference sources work particularly well in a digital format because they can be updated continuously to avoid obsolescence, and also because they can be accessed on mobile devices, which is a tremendous convenience. In addition, reference works tend not to be read from beginning to end, and do not suffer when accessed in random order.

I hope the digital Britannica will thrive!

Kudos to Fred Shapiro

Congratulations to my old friend and former colleague Fred Shapiro, Associate Librarian for Collections & Access at Yale Law Library, who is praised in an article in the February 12, 2012 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. (A subscription is required to access the article). Donald Altschiller, a librarian at Boston University, highlights several reference works and their authors in "In Praise of Reference-Book Authors."

As someone who has worked in academic law libraries since 1984, I had not encountered (or even thought about) most of the reference works Altschiller writes about since library school. He eulogizes Joseph Nathan Kane, author of Famous First Facts, who died in 2002. I had no idea that Kane hosted a radio program during the 1930s also called Famous First Facts and that he later wrote questions for the TV program The $64,000 Question. Kane wrote nearly fifty other reference works and did most of his work at the New York Public Library, "methodically combing library stacks and card catalogs to produce authoritative reference works." Norbert Pearlroth, author of the "Ripley's Believe It or Not" column, also worked at the New York Public Library, and is described by Altschiller as one of the most "indefatigable and meticulous researchers of factual information." The other reference-book luminaries that Altschiller includes are Samuel Johnson, Noah Webster, Peter Mark Roget, Henry Campbell Black of Black's Law Dictionary fame, and the Reverend Ebenezer Cobham Brewer who compiled Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, a literally irreplaceable reference work in the pre-Internet era.

More modern compilers of reference works are not neglected in Altschiller's piece, including Fred Shapiro, who employs "both painstaking book research along with modern library technology to produce landmark quotation books. His Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations ... [is] "the standard work for law quotations, and later his mammoth Yale Book of Quotations emerged as the pre-eminent general quotation reference work."

It was refreshing to read Altschiller's article and rediscover some favorite reference works and to be introduced to some new ones. At a time when Wikipedia is considered authoritative, many people seem not to recognize or value the meticulous, detail-oriented work that once went into creating high-quality reference works and that is a shame.