Compton's Encyclopedia

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Compton's Encyclopedia and Fact-Index is the title of an encyclopedia published in Elmhurst, Illinois since the 1920s. The company was founded by Chandler B. Beach and in 1907 continued by F. E. Compton. In 1961 it was acquired by the Encyclopedia Britannica Inc. and in 1992, Encyclopedia Britannica Inc. published a CD-ROM edition of Compton's Encyclopedia. In the creation of Encyclopedia Britannica Online (1994), the company was able to build on experience from the aforementioned multimedia edition of Compton's Encyclopedia. From the 1990s to 2001, Compton's Encyclopedia was a product of The Learning Company. In March 2007, Encyclopaedia Britannica "acquired an exclusive license to publish and distribute Compton's Encyclopedia in print and CD-ROM from Broderbund LLC and Success Publishing Group".[1]

Contents

[edit] Titles, editions and sizes

[edit] Print

  • Compton's Pictured Encyclopedia, 8 volumes, 1922
    • 10 volumes, 1924, 1926, 1929
    • 16 volumes, 1931
    • 15 volumes, 1948
  • 1937, 1938, 1940, 1945, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1953, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1962
  • Compton's Encyclopedia and Fact-Index, 24 volumes 1969-1971
    • 22 volumes, 1972, 1973
    • 26 volumes, annually 1974-1978 and 1980-1995, 2004
  • Compton's by Britannica
    • 26 volumes, 2007 - "written and visually designed for students ages 10 to 17"[2]

[edit] CDROM

  • Compton's Family Encyclopedia, CDROM, 1990, 1991. See the inspiring article on it in 1990 Mar 19 Newsweek, p. 45.
  • Compton's Multimedia Encyclopedia, CDROM, 1992
  • Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia, CDROM, annually 1995-1998

[edit] CD-ROM editions

An electronic version of Compton's Encyclopedia has been available on CD-ROM and DVD-ROM since 1992. Encyclopedia Britannica in its Encyclopædia Britannica Online has incorporated Compton's Interactive encyclopedia into its database.

The CD itself was praised for its hundreds of multimedia elements, even in its earliest editions, including images, sounds, and video. It was also celebrated for the diversity of the topics its many thousands of articles covered.

The 1995 edition included creatively-named sections such as the "newsroom" for searching recent events or the "playroom" for children-oriented articles. Articles could still be searched for via the "idea search", which looked up the entered keyword in the whole article, or searching in the "contents", which attempted to match the entered text with the title of an article.

In 1994, Compton's shocked the computer world by asserting a software patent of dubious validity that was later cancelled by the Patent Office.

While innovative, Compton's was not the first multimedia encyclopedia. Grolier had published Academic American Encyclopedia on CD-ROM in 1985.

A version of the CD-ROM edition was also released for the Sega CD video game system.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ "Compton's Encyclopedia Returns to Britannica" , news release, Encyclopædia Britannica, March 20, 2007
  2. ^ "Compton's Encyclopedia, 2007 Edition, 26 volumes", EncyclopediaCenter.com, retrieved April 26, 2008
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