Human knowledge is the most valuable work of our civilization. From century to century, information has been accumulated and transmitted on the most convenient media. Gigantic libraries, archives, databases, all this - a storehouse of information from different fields of science. Separate, generalized topic of knowledge arrays form encyclopedias. It is about them that our article will be.
We are going to talk about what an encyclopedia is, what it can be and what it can tell us. If this topic is interesting, then we invite you to continue with us.
Encyclopedia: concept
Let's start with the concept of what an encyclopedia is. This is a book or electronic publication, scientific or popular science, containing information about a particular area of scientific research of practical activity. The term came from the merger of two Greek words: enkyklios and paideia, which in the translation is interpreted as "learning in a circle of knowledge."
Principles of building encyclopedias
Information in encyclopedias is placed in a certain way. Depending on this principle, the types of publications are also distinguished.
So, the basic principles for posting encyclopedic articles are alphabetical, thematic, and alphabetically thematic. As for ease of use, for the reader who is not prepared in a specific question, it will be more relevant to use encyclopedias with the alphabetical placement of articles. For specific scientific encyclopedias, the thematic-alphabetical order of information placement is more convenient.
The most interesting varieties of encyclopedias are thematic. Depending on the aspects of the publication covered in them, there are:
- universal - collecting information about all the realities of life, relating mainly to the country that issued the encyclopedia;
- regional - contain facts about any region of the country, the mainland or our planet in general;
- industry - provide information exclusively related to a particular branch of human activity;
- narrowly specialized (problematic) - illuminate a specific issue of one of the branches of human activity that constitutes a separate problem (scientific or practical);
- biographical, dedicated to the life and work of famous luminaries of science, art, politics and other social spheres;
- other encyclopedias, mainly those that represent an array of information for a specific readership (a striking example is children's encyclopedias that provide a variety of data that interest children of a certain age).
An intermediate result of our research will be knowledge of what an encyclopedia is, and the main types of the latter.
We distinguish: encyclopedias and reference encyclopedias, dictionaries-encyclopedias
There is another criterion by which it is worth distinguishing between these books. It concerns the methods of presenting information. In accordance with it, encyclopedic literature is divided into encyclopedias, reference encyclopedias and encyclopedias.
Encyclopedia dictionaries are distinguished by the fact that they provide information concisely, often in the mere interpretation of the term.
Encyclopedias provide more information: in addition to interpreting a word or phenomenon, we can learn from them about its history, relations with other concepts. It is the versatility and vastness of the presentation that makes them the most interesting type to read. Such a publication is the well-known universal "Great Soviet Encyclopedia".
Another type that we did not consider is the reference book. This type of encyclopedia contains material arranged by thematic groups for convenient use.
Summary
Thus, we examined what an encyclopedia is. This is an array of information of a particular industry or general information located according to a certain principle. There are many types of encyclopedias, subdivided according to various criteria.
Encyclopedias contain a huge amount of useful and interesting knowledge. It is necessary to touch more often the achievements of human development through these publications!