Henrietta Hay's Column

I inherited the full 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, copyright 1911. That is the classical edition, full of scholarly articles on history and philosophy. It fills 30 tall volumes, with leather binding and thin, crinkly rag paper. It takes up a huge amount of space and is not exactly a day-to-day reference source.

Since I don't have room for it in my house, I passed it along to my friend the philosopher and let her worry about finding space for an antique. Her grandchildren will probably look at it some day and wonder what it's for. It does not contain any information about anything that has taken place in the 20th century. Who, they will think, would ever need that much space to store all that useless information that only philosophers and historians would ever read. By then there will probably be a copy in the Smithsonian, along with the Spirit of St. Louis.

Meanwhile I have just acquired a new edition of another encyclopedia on one CD ROM. [The initials stand for "Compact Disk/Read-only Memory"--but then youngsters already knew that and oldsters are not necessarily enlightened by that piece of information. -DCH] This is a little disk that measures 4 3/4 inches across and is about as thick as a piece of good paper.

I have been trying to figure out what all this means in terms of human progress. A recent essay I read suggested that the history of human civilization could be divided roughly into three time periods. For the first few million years non-verbal communication consisted of cutting primitive drawings into rock. Then for thousands of years a very few people laboriously wrote on whatever material they could find and only the scholars could read it.

With the invention of the printing press, knowledge became available not only to the scholars, but to everyone.

Now the third period is opening: the age of electronic media and it is a change as fundamental as the printing press. Is it progress? I don't know. But it really doesn't matter what we think. It's here. That's the way it is.

So -- here I sit with a whole encyclopedia on one little disk, accessible in seconds. This little disk is not filled with beautiful music, as all my others have been, but with information. This one is full of words and animations and dialogue and graphics, all interpreted by a computer.

But I do wonder. As we keep inventing stuff and improving stuff and changing the whole system of acquiring and disseminating knowledge, adding all the bells and whistles that make learning "fun" are we getting ahead of ourselves again? Is it possible that we are having so much fun perfecting the messenger that we have forgotten the message?

Certainly the messenger is fun to use and I am fascinated by it. In terms of scholarship or serious research, however, my CD ROM encyclopedia is still a toy. It is working so hard to be entertaining and to keep from boring me that it almost loses sight of its main purpose. It's wonderful for the easy stuff and I can - and do - sit at my desk and usually find what I want without having to stand up and search. I have several other CD ROM's that are highly entertaining, as they flash their lights and sing out their words. One lists and describes over 19,000 movies, with stills and dialogue on some of them. Another that I have ordered has a dictionary, Roget, a concise encyclopedia and a dictionary of quotations, all on one disk. Awesome, as the kids say.

But for the hard stuff, I will still rely on my Information Store. I have to get up and climb into my car and drive to the library. That is still the place to find the hard answers and access to just about any tidbit of information I or anybody else might want. And although it is equipped with many electronic information tools, books have not gone out of style. After all, it doesn't take four hours to learn to use a book. I'm still trying to figure out how to by-pass the stuff I don't want on the movie disk and find one for next Saturday night.

CD ROMs are here to stay, and I use them every day. But there is something sensually satisfying about leafing through the 11th Britannica that the computer will never equal.