Page 167 - DLIS006_INFORMATION SOURCES AND SERVICES

Information Sources and Services

Notes it may leave the reader lacking in understanding the meaning, significance or limitations of a
term, and how the term relates to a broader field of knowledge. An encyclopaedia is, allegedly,
not written in order to convince, although one of its goals is indeed to convince its reader about
its own veracity. In the terms of Aristotle’s Modes of persuasion, a dictionary should persuade
the reader through logos (conveying only appropriate emotions); it will be expected to have a
lack of pathos and to have little ethos except that of the dictionary itself.

!

Caution It should not stir up irrelevant emotions.
To address those needs, an encyclopaedia article is typically non-linguistic, and covers not a
word, but a subject or discipline. As well as defining and listing synonymous terms for the topic,
the article is able to treat it in more depth and convey the most relevant accumulated knowledge
on that subject. An encyclopaedia article also often includes many maps and illustrations, as
well as bibliography and statistics.
Four major elements define an encyclopaedia: its subject matter, its scope, its method of
organization, and its method of production:
Encyclopaedias can be general, containing articles on topics in every field (the English-
language Encyclopaedia Britannica and German Brockhaus are well-known examples).
General encyclopaedias often contain guides on how to do a variety of things, as well as
embedded dictionaries and gazetteers. There are also encyclopaedias that cover a wide
variety of topics but from a particular cultural, ethnic, or national perspective, such as the
Great Soviet Encyclopaedia or Encyclopaedia Judaica.

Works of encyclopaedic scope aim to convey the important accumulated knowledge for
their subject domain, such as an encyclopaedia of medicine, philosophy, or law. Works
vary in the breadth of material and the depth of discussion, depending on the target
audience. (For example, the Medical encyclopaedia produced by A.D.A.M., Inc. for the U.S.
National Institutes of Health.)
Some systematic method of organization is essential to making an encyclopaedia usable
as a work of reference. There have historically been two main methods of organizing
printed encyclopaedias: the alphabetical method (consisting of a number of separate articles,
organised in alphabetical order), or organization by hierarchical categories. The former
method is today the most common by far, especially for general works. The fluidity of
electronic media, however, allows new possibilities for multiple methods of organization
of the same content. Further, electronic media offer previously unimaginable capabilities
for search, indexing and cross reference. The epigraph from Horace on the title page of the
18th century Encyclopédie suggests the importance of the structure of an encyclopaedia:
“What grace may be added to commonplace matters by the power of order and connection.”

As modern multimedia and the information age have evolved, they have had an ever-
increasing effect on the collection, verification, summation, and presentation of information
of all kinds. Projects such as Everything2, Encarta, h2g2, and Wikipedia are examples of
new forms of the encyclopaedia as information retrieval becomes simpler.

Some works entitled “dictionaries” are actually similar to encyclopaedias, especially those
concerned with a particular field (such as the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, the Dictionary of
American Naval Fighting Ships, and Black’s Law Dictionary). The Macquarie Dictionary,
Australia’s national dictionary, became an encyclopaedic dictionary after its first edition in
recognition of the use of proper nouns in common communication, and the words derived from
such proper nouns.

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