Victor Lieberman originally posted this on LIBREF and has allowed me to post it here as well.
\”I just read a book review in the Winter 2002 issue of Daedalus, and
became disgusted. In what is otherwise a very thoughtful review by Neil
J. Smelser on the _New International Encyclopedia of the Social and
Behavioral Sciences_, the author commits a huge and careless error. He
writes on page 152 col. 2: \”There has been an explosion in the number
of encyclopedias. Amazon.com lists six thousands of them for sale, and
Barnesand noble.com nine thousand.\”
Nine thousand encyclopedias? Watch out, World Book.
Anyone who has helped students research in online catalogs probably
knows where this rant is heading. I IMMEDIATELY went to
Barnesandnoble.com to witness for myself this heretofore undocumented
explosion of reference publishing…
Victor Lieberman originally posted this on LIBREF and has allowed me to post it here as well.
\”I just read a book review in the Winter 2002 issue of Daedalus, and
became disgusted. In what is otherwise a very thoughtful review by Neil
J. Smelser on the _New International Encyclopedia of the Social and
Behavioral Sciences_, the author commits a huge and careless error. He
writes on page 152 col. 2: \”There has been an explosion in the number
of encyclopedias. Amazon.com lists six thousands of them for sale, and
Barnesand noble.com nine thousand.\”
Nine thousand encyclopedias? Watch out, World Book.
Anyone who has helped students research in online catalogs probably
knows where this rant is heading. I IMMEDIATELY went to
Barnesandnoble.com to witness for myself this heretofore undocumented
explosion of reference publishing…
It turns out, when you examine the category \”encyclopedias\” in the
website book browsing subject menu, you encounter 352 encyclopedias
offered for sale by Barnesandnoble.com. A large number, certainly, but
a bit shy of 9000. Really, why not just do a Yahoo or Google search and
add the number of zeros of your choice!
So, basically, I wonder how many of the reviewer\’s \”encyclopedias\” were,
maybe, things like \”Encyclopedia Brown,\” for example, in gazillions of
paperback, hardcover, &etc. editions? And although a rather distinctive
word, I could imagine titles featuring \”encyclopedia\” that might not
have actually *been* encyclopedias. The truth is, I suspect, that the
author didn\’t check, and just wanted some justification for his
hyperbole.
Amazon.com was somewhat harder to check. Their browse category for
encyclopedias is not listed out numerically as is B&N\’s. And when I
went into their \”general\” link, they had 900+ listings, which was way
more than I would guessed.
However …
Do I necessarily consider _Asimov\’s Chronology of the Word_ or
_Journalism Ethics: A Reference Handbook_ an \”encyclopedia\”? Some
might. The list looked like it was more of a \”general reference\” list
than one composed strictly of encyclopedias in any careful
interpretation of the term.
I use to use an example in a BI class we use to teach at my university.
A writer in the magazine, _Scientific American_, came out with a
statement something like \”in the last 10 years, no less that 5000 (or a
million, or whatever huge number) of articles have been written on
crises in education, based on listings in a national article index.\” I
knew that the only index the writer could have been referring to was
ERIC or maybe the Wilson Education Index. In any event, the neat class
demonstration was that we could determine whether or not this statement
was true with the resources and skills we were learning about in our
library research class. And, of course, the same thing was true. A
keyword search on \”crisis\” or \”crises\” in ERIC certainly does retrieve a
pile of listings (it\’s true, educators do have more than their fair
share it seems). But how many of these articles were indexed under the
descriptor \”crisis,\” or alternate terms that might get at this concept?
Well, … far fewer than the author cited, anyway.
So, …
I\’m kind of wound down, now, but it still gets me peeved (for no really
good reason, but if you\’re a librarian, I suppose you have to get
exercised about something, and this is one of those things for me). 400
bazillion web pages does not constitute an information explosion. It
constitutes 400 bazillion web pages. Even a cursory examination of
these will demonstrate that 395 bazillion of them are 404 errors, and
another 3 bazillion are redirects. This leaves us with only a much more
manageable 2 bazillion web pages, with approximately 500 containing
actual text content, and the remainder cut & pastes or links to the
same.
And not 9000 encyclopedias.
Information maybe growing exponentially. Actually knowledge is perhaps
on a different scale. It\’s like counting every copy of every book and
magazine issue ever published as a new piece of \”information.\” With
apologies to the McKerrows and Bowers out there, I disagree.
Rant over.
Victor Lieberman
University of North Dakota
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