ONLINE CONTENT HAS REPLACED ENCYCLOPEDIAS (3-2004) Back in the 1950s, the Walt Disney cartoon character, Jiminy Cricket, had a message for kids: When you want to find out stuff, look in the encyclopedia. The top-hat- wearing insectoid even had a catchy tune to help kids learn how to spell it, “E-N-C-Y-C-L-O-P-E-D-I-A.” If Jiminy were still in production today, he, like most people, probably wouldn’t give the encyclopedia a first glance. He might sing to kids about the ultimate reference source, the I-N-T-E-R-N-E-T. Librarians now find it rather odd when students actually go to the encyclopedia shelves to look up information. “A lot of times we have to say, ‘Hey, we can maybe find this in the encyclopedia,’” said Cathy Hamm, library director at Edinburgh Public Library. “They don't even think of that.” She said if you know exactly what you’re looking for, sometimes the hard-bound volumes are just more efficient. “The first place they want to look is the Internet,” Hamm said. “And when they do, we often refer them to Inspire.net.” Inspire.net is the official Indiana virtual library, where Hoosiers can access thousands of databases, including newspaper and magazine archives, medical reference material, scientific research papers, and biographies. Encyclopedias were once sold by door-to-door salesmen. I’ll admit it; I used to be an encyclopedia salesman. But I wasn’t very good at it. In fact, I was probably my best customer. I bought the entire World Book reference set, including the encyclopedias, the two-volume dictionary, and a set of Child Craft children’s books. And I didn’t even have kids yet. Still, even after I stopped trying to sell them, I made my reference set a centerpiece in my den. I also kept it up to date by purchasing the yearbook each year. Then, sometime in the mid-‘90s, I sold the whole set for something like 20 bucks. I probably had more than 700 dollars invested in it. But it was a sign of things to come, as the hard-bound volumes had already started to outlive their usefulness. These days, encyclopedias sit idle on the shelves of libraries, and in homes that still have them. Once the crown jewel of the well-educated American family, the space-hogging volumes now do little more than gather dust. In the 1980s, parents used the installment plan to purchase the expensive sets, which could easily cost more than 1,000 dollars for a set of Encyclopedia Britannica. But it was a good investment in the education of their children. But the encyclopedia salesman has gone the way of the dinosaur, since parents have little incentive to buy them any longer. In fact, Encyclopedia Britannica hasn’t tried to sell its volumes door to door since 1996. Funk and Wagnalls, made famous by the “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in” TV program in the late 1960s, is no longer in existence. Neither is Collier’s. The ones that remain, such as World Book and Britannica, are now focusing on offering online content to subscribers. They also sell encyclopedias on disk. A single CD-ROM can not only hold the entire encyclopedia, it can also add full-motion video and sound, something that the hard-bound volumes could never do. In addition, the online encyclopedias are more up to date. Encyclopedia year books were often outdated before they even came out of the box. But online content can be updated as often as required, almost immediately after a historic event has taken place. Hard-bound encyclopedias are still being made, primarily to be sold to institutions. But, kids look upon using them the same way a scientist might look upon using a slide rule. Why use a slide rule when a calculator is faster, easier, and more accurate? Many of today’s kids can use a computer before they even learn to read. It’s only natural that they would scoff at using something as antiquated as an encyclopedia when they can find what they’re looking for online. They just must keep in mind that there is an awfully lot of junk on the Internet. When doing online research, it is imperative that students find Web sites they can trust.