CZ Talk:Charter/Definitions

I read in US History encyclopedia about the history and metamorphosis of the encyclopedia. The first thing that caught my attention was that encyclopedias do seem to specialize, ie. "American Encyclopedia of Social Sciences." They started as a storehouse if information - a place to gather all knowledge in one place. However, they took a stance that in the dawn of the information age, the purpose of the encyclopedia may need to change. This source's last sentence said, "The explosion of electronic sources in many ways supplanted the "storehouse of facts" that was one of the major original functions of encyclopedias. The vast quantity of immediately accessible information made the encyclopedia's purpose of providing an authoritative "systematic survey" of knowledge even more essential in the information age." The phraseology "systematic survey" got my attention. D. Matt Innis 02:51, 16 October 2009 (UTC)