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Last week, having finished working on the 2010 Encyclopedia Update, I decided to take a look back at previous updates, and I wrote here about the very first two updates we did, back in the mid-1980s.

For several years after we started our annual updates, there were few changes either in encyclopedia publishing or in our coverage. In the spring, Reference Books Bulletin staff sent letters to all the encyclopedia publishers asking them for particular information and for two (at least) copies of each set. Each encyclopedia was assigned to a different reviewer, and all the reviewers got together at the ALA Annual Conference to go over the drafts. Then, the editor put the drafts together into a coherent whole. Making the reviews consistent was (and still is) the hard part.

In the intro to our 1992 update, we noted “this was a difficult year for encyclopedia editors, as dramatic events in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe continued to the end of the year.”  In the following years, people who were involved in encyclopedia publishing  may have wished they could return to the days when keeping up with current events was their biggest headache. In 1994,  then-editor of Reference Books Bulletin Sandy Whiteley wrote:

The number of print encyclopedias sold in recent years is declining, while sales of electronic titles have grown rapidly. This year about 600,000 sets of print encyclopedias will be sold (down from approximately 900,000 several years ago); an estimated 4,000,000 CD-ROM encyclopedias have been sold since the inception of this technology.

Although CD-ROM encyclopedias had been around for several years, our 1994 update included CD-ROMs  for the first time. I’ll be posting again about how our coverage of encyclopedias has evolved.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 7th, 2010 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Print Resources, Publishing, Reference Sources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.