Goodbye, Encarta

I learned yesterday that, later this year, Microsoft will cease to produce the Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia products. The digital encyclopedia all but killed the print encyclopedia, and now it is being killed itself by the Internet.

The Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia was first produced in 1993, and at the time it was a stand-alone CD product only. But it was cool. I first used it in 1995, and I was blown away by the possibility. Here was an encyclopedia where you could jump from topic to topic in an instant, without having to put one book away and get out another. Moreover, there was video and audio on the Microsoft encyclopedia! Now a young student could do more than just read about Martin Luther King, Jr. He could watch part of the King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech right there on his computer! It was too cool. Unfortunately, I never really got to use it in my classroom. The first computers we had in our district didn't have CD-ROM drives on them. By the time we got around to replacing those computers, in the late 90's, the computers had CD-ROM drives but no speakers. And by the time we got around to replacing THOSE computers at the beginning of this century, Wikipedia and encarta online and other online encyclopedias had replaced the Encarta product as the most efficient ways of getting information. But I still always thought the Encarta CD-ROMs were a neat idea, and a nice bridge from the print encyclopedia to the larger world of the Internet.

All that said, they'll never have as soft a place in my heart as the Merit Students Encyclopedias that I had as a kid. In many ways, those were my version of the Internet when I was young. I used to browse the encyclopedias in pretty much the same way that I browse the Internet sometimes today.

My God! Could I be any more of a geek!

I read them until I wore out the poor things, and I even took them with me when I moved out of the house. I kept them in my classroom for years, and though they eventually became very outdated, I would still read them from time to time, and would allow my students to use them if what they were researching involved something where the scholarship hadn't changed much over the last forty years (something like William Shakespeare).

I don't have them anymore, though I know exactly where they are: They're all in the bottom of the well at Vent Haven Museum. I tossed them in there long, long ago.