The electronic version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, to be called Britannica Online, is now being tested by students and faculty at the University of California at San Diego. "I've scrambled pretty hard just to keep up with the technical language." "The whole development process has been an astonishing one for me," said Robert McHenry, editor in chief of the Britannica.
The 225-year-old Encyclopedia Britannica, which is the oldest continuously published encyclopedia in the English language, will be made available initially to university faculty and students in the fall, using a variety of information-retrieval technologies that have been developed experimentally by Internet researchers and that are being quickly commercialized.Įncyclopedia Britannica executives said they were also planning to make their reference data base available to a larger commercial audience, but academic distribution would be a first step to insure that the electronic version of the encyclopedia was well tested. "We've all been there before, the night before we have a paper due in class." "This is a blessing for every school kid," Paul Saffo, a researcher at the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif., said.
It also represents a significant move toward instant information and a milestone in miniaturization for the 32-volume reference work, which contains 44 million words and 23,000 illustrations and adorns the bookshelves of millions of libraries and homes.
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