The Canadian Encyclopedia: Looking Ahead

“It is clear that the electronic world will force changes not only in the delivery of the information, but in the very nature of the information itself.”

 

The Canadian Encyclopedia recently celebrated the 25^th anniversary of the publication of the printed volumes in 1985. It is in fact 30 years since I began work assembling The Canadian Encyclopedia in Edmonton, Alberta (see my history of The Canadian Encyclopedia).

The multi-volume printed encyclopedia, dutifully alphabetized from “A Mari usque ad mare” to “Zooplankton,” appeared similar to any encyclopedia of the past 200, from Diderot’s Encyclopédie to Britannica, except that “all the knowledge” was Canadian.

Editor in chief since 1980 James Marsh speaking at the Convention Centre, Ottawa on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the publication of The Canadian Encyclopedia.

It was the great good fortune of my career that at the very time it became financially unfeasible to continue to print The Canadian Encyclopedia (some 250,000 sets and almost a million volumes had been sold), a digital revolution shook our world. With its attempt to represent “all knowledge” and its large number of internal cross references linking articles (think hypertext), the encyclopedia was a natural fit for digital delivery. We were in fact the first encyclopedia in the world to use a computer (University of Alberta’s Amdahl mainframe) and a database program (Spires) in the early 1980s to track article lists, contributor information, numbers of words, schedules, etc.

The addition of a search engine greatly enhanced the power and accessibility of the work and the CD-ROM versions of the late 1990s sold hundreds of thousands of copies. In 1999 we tentatively put the encyclopedia online and became part of that greatest of all encyclopedias, the World Wide Web.

By its very nature The Canadian Encyclopedia was from the beginning more than just a collection of books uploaded to the internet. It was an internal network of linked, comprehensive and coherent information. Also, unlike most of the information on the growing World Wide Web, the encyclopedia was also a thoroughly edited, researched and verified source of information, written by thousands of experts.

While the primary occupation of the editors has been to update and expand the text of The Canadian Encyclopedia online, we have also been aware of the need to adapt technically and the past ten years have seen many changes in design, programming, linkages, social media, and multimedia, and we recently launched a mobile version (end of March) and are planning a number of apps. How different this world is from the world of print!

Now that the 25^th anniversary has passed, we are encouraged to look ahead (is it even possible to imagine the world 25 years from now?). We remain convinced that, perhaps now more than ever, our portrait of Canada is extremely valuable, that the information that we provide is essential for Canadians (in both languages), in particular for our young people, who do not have access to another purely Canadian general reference work online.

Now the future has been challenging us. We are encouraged to ask fundamental questions about the nature of our enterprise. Will future developments change the very nature of what an encyclopedia should or can be? The sure world of bound and printed books imposed certain limitations on encyclopedias, notably the length and numbers of articles, that are no longer relevant. The stunning success of Wikipedia has challenged the principles of authority, but the threats and challenges are greater than that. It is clear that the electronic world will force changes not only in the delivery of the information, but in the very nature of the information itself. For the editors, sorting out the questions, listening nervously to those who claim to predict the future, and finding a plan to remake the encyclopedia is daunting.

We will be raising some of the questions in this space in the hopes that by thinking out loud some answers are in sight.

James Marsh is editor in chief of The Canadian Encyclopedia