Broom Hilda by Russell Myers for March 31, 2024

You can trust the information in encyclopedias.

As a student, I always enjoyed browsing through different volumes of the encyclopedia. Of course, this was LONG before the internet (class of 1970), LOL.

It may be =faster= but is it correct?

I remember standing in front of the card catalog for EVER., trying to find the one book I needed for a paper, only to find out someone else had the book. They never returned the book, so I had to change my paper.

Who didn’t see that one coming from a block away?

I still have a couple of encyclopedias.

AI: Aged Intelligence

Teaching a class on English Comp when Google was new. Took students to library for a class on using it. They had a set of questions to answer.

Two important lessons were learned: One – you can find some amazingly good stuff on the Internet. Two – you can’t trust everything on the internet, some of them discovered pages with wrong information.

Unless the country you’re trying to look up wasn’t around when the encyclopedia was published…

If he knew to do that, why did he ask her in the first place?

My set (that I still use on occasion) is dated 1964.

Alas, the serendipity of finding something in the pages of a book is—gone! (not really true, but the value of an encyclopedia is certainly questionable now).

The problem with just googling things is that so often you don’t really know what to look for.

My daughter has the encyclopedia I bought her when she was a child. I have my father’s WWII era edition.

And all he learned is a word :-(

I would read the entire entry and then torture my family by reciting it at supper.

I read the encyclopedia when I was a kid! A person at that time could open up the books and ask me a question and I knew it!

I loved to “read” the encyclopedia for fun. I guess I thought one day I might be on Jeopardy.

But you learned something Broomie, there’s a better way.

I read his question as “Alabama”, and was really confused by the answer he found.

we had encyclopedias occupying an entire wall of shelves in the living room when i was a kid. great decorations, read them all the time for fun. the only reason you’d want to own a set now is to fill up some empty bookshelves to try to impress visitors, ’cause much of the information is out of date as soon as the books are printed…