BY TRACY COLEY CURLEE (ABJ ’90)

he media center at River Trail Middle School in Atlanta is not the type of library most adults would recognize. Classical music streams from the sound system, blending with the chatter of students working on assignments throughout the large room. Some of the action is in the books section, but most of the students are engaged in research at the 35 wireless computer stations. Social studies teacher Geri Collins moves from student to student, making sure her eighth graders are finding answers to questions on a practice test that will prepare them for the CRCT (Criterion Referenced Competency Test), which determines if a school is keeping up with state-mandated educational standards. The search engine the students are using is brand new, and Collins is one of the first teachers in the state to adopt the UGA-based site as part of her curriculum.

The New Georgia Encyclopedia, a Web site packed with information related to the state of Georgia, was launched in February as a joint project of the Georgia Humanities Council, the UGA Press, the governor’s office, and the University System of Georgia/GALILEO (Georgia’s Virtual Library). Anyone with an Internet connection can access a wealth of articles and images about people, places, events, and institutions, as well as links to other Web sites related to history, culture, and life in Georgia.

Collins, who has taught Georgia history for more than 12 years and is scheduled to receive her doctorate from UGA this fall, is enthusiastic about the teaching-and-learning capabilities of the New Georgia Encyclopedia.

“These kids are part of an audio-visual generation,” she says. “They get more out of reading on a computer than a textbook. This is perfect for them.”

The idea behind the New Georgia Encyclopedia is that it will always be current—a living document about the state’s past, present, and even its future.

Let’s say you want to find information on former president and Nobel Prize recipient Jimmy Carter. You start by typing in the NGE Web address (www.georgiaencyclopedia.org). A quick search pulls up 25 articles referencing Jimmy Carter with the first entry leading the user to a compendium of his personal history, including: Carter resigning his Naval commission after the death of his father in 1953, his run for the state senate and how he streamlined Georgia’s government’s agencies as governor; his hard-fought battles as president with economic issues and the Iran hostage situation; and his association with other Georgia governors such as Carl Sanders and Lester Maddox —with links to their NGE articles and external Web sites like Atlanta’s Carter Center and the Jimmy Carter National Historic site in Plains. The articles include information about Carter’s present-day involvement in promoting global health and international democracy.

Another interesting facet of the New Georgia Encyclopedia is the use of video clips of historical events, such as Hank Aaron’s 715th home run and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Second Emancipation Proclamation” speech. There are also audio clips, with Kate Pierson and Keith Strickland of The B-52s talking about the origins of their band while their 1990 hit song “Love Shack” plays in the background.

“There are currently 700 articles to reference on the NGE Web site,” says managing editor Kelly Caudle (AB ’90), “and we expect another 1,300 to be added within the next two years.”

Keeping all of that online information current will add to the popularity of a site that is on its way to one million hits in its first four months—surpassing what was expected of NGE during its first year of operation.

So what do today’s new-media-savvy students think?

“This site is really neat!” says Karthink Narayan to Geri Collins. “What program was this created in? HTML or FrontPage?”

River Trail media specialist Pat Wall sees NGE as a valuable resource. “Especially for our eighth-grade Georgia Studies classes and their teachers,” says Wall. “Locating print material for this grade level is difficult. While it has always been easy to locate information on the more popular Georgia historical figures and places, the New Georgia Encyclopedia fills in gaps on more obscure personalities and events.”

The New Georgia Encyclopedia is jazzy and accessible. We walk a fine line between the integrity of a book and the flashiness of an interactve Web site. — Jamil Zainaldin

Encyclopedias have been a research tool for more than 230 years. The Encyclopaedia Britannica is the oldest, English-language general reference, first published in 1768 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Today, a hardbound, 32-volume set with a CD-ROM and accompanying one year online subscription costs well over $1,000, an amount that most households and classrooms don’t want to spend—especially with free search engines like Google available to anyone with Internet access.

Jamil Zainaldin, director of the Georgia Humanities Council, says the problem with search engines like Google is that consumers are offered every possible link to any given subject, whether those sites provide correct information or not. “The NGE, available through GALILEO provided in most Georgia public libraries, is an authoritative, accurate resource that has been written by scholars and experts in their fields,” says Zainaldin. “Yet it is written simply enough that many young people can understand it.”

The New Georgia Encyclopedia staff (clockwise from lower left): John Inscoe, Erin McLeod, Kelly Caudle, Melinda Smith, Elisabeth Hughes, and Elizabete Vasconcelos.

The NGE staff has instituted a rigorous process to ensure that what’s posted on the Web site is the most current and correct information available. Thirty-two section editors helped shape the content within their areas of expertise, and helped identify the most appropriate authors to write articles on topics in their areas. When the commissioned article has been completed, it reaches the desk of associate editor Elisabeth Hughes, who sends them out for review to section editors, NGE Editor John Inscoe, and eventually to Caudle, who oversees copy editing for journalistic style and consistency, loading onto the site and final proofing. Each article is also checked for accuracy by a team of fact checkers primarily from UGA and Georgia State. Also during this stage media editors located and procured multimedia—images, videos, audio files) to accompany the articles.

“It can take as much as nine months from start to finish to get an article up on the site,” says Inscoe who also balances teaching a full classroom load with critiquing up to 20-30 articles a week. “But what we present is a very high level of factual accuracy.”

he genesis of the New Georgia Encyclopedia can be traced to Zainaldin, who came to Georgia from Washington, D.C. in 1997, having taught history at Northwestern, Case Western Reserve, and Georgetown. As the new president and CEO of the Georgia Humanities Council in Atlanta, Zainaldin wanted to create a project that would raise the GHC’s profile and increase commercial and financial support for the state.

In early 1998, Zainaldin paid a visit to Karen Orchard, who at that time was director of the UGA Press. Zainaldin suggested that the Press embellish its 1996 publication, The New Georgia Guide into an encyclopedia. Orchard and Tom Dyer—a former GHC board member, UGA professor, chair of the UGA Press —had already been discussing such an endeavor. A planning committee was created and it was Edward Weldon, head of the state archives at that time, who suggested that the project should go electronic. There was a long silence at the table as everyone considered the idea. Then people began nodding their heads. By the end of that meeting what had started as an idea for a book had evolved into a CD or DVD.

Needing state backing, Zainaldin wrote a letter to then-Gov. Zell Miller (AB ’57, MA ’58) requesting $25,000 to get the project started. Not long after the letter was sent, Miller was speaking at the Georgia Center in Athens. And as fate would have it, Dyer was going up a building stairwell as Miller was coming down. Miller, who knew Dyer from his previous position as head of the GHC, exchanged greetings and then said, “Tom, we’re going to help you get that project started” with a grant of $100,000.

There were no electronic state encyclopedias at that time, so the committee studied The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture published by the UNC Press, where Dyer was a section editor, and the encyclopedia of Chicago history, a book project that was planning eventually to do an electronic edition. Needing more expertise, they drafted Jayne Williams, University System Assistant Vice Chancellor responsible for GALILEO. Through discussions with Williams and her staff, the committee decided in early 2000 that the encyclopedia shouldn’t be a CD or DVD, but instead an Internet-based tool readily available to millions of people. Zainaldin, who is the former head of the national association of state humanities councils, immediately hit the pavement, raising money and garnering rapid support from foundations and state government. Over the next four years, the New Georgia Encyclopedia received $2 million in funding from governors Miller, Barnes, and Perdue, the National Endowment for the Humanities and private sources.

Once the money was raised, the committee faced four crucial decisions: how to get the encyclopedia into an Internet format (there was no existing program to handle such a task), what the target market was, what kind of content would work best, and the site’s “look and feel.”

Six companies submitted proposals for writing the Internet programming, and the committee ultimately chose Merrill Hall New Media because they were the only one of the six that had done similar work.

“Merrill Hall was [technologically] far ahead of everyone else,” says Zainaldin, “and their concept matched what we wanted.”

The NGE Web site (www.georgiaencyclopedia.org) currently contains 700 articles. In two years, that total will increase to 2,000.

To stay as current as possible, the NGE was going to require a markup language to facilitate searches and ongoing changes. Merrill Hall’s answer was technology they could formulate from the ground up: XML. Unlike HTML, XML can evolve, grow, and adjust with just a fraction of reprogramming—which means less work for the NGE staff. Over the next year, there was daily communication between Merrill Hall, the NGE staff and the committee regarding Web site design and functionality.

To determine the target audience, Merrill Hall set up focus groups to gauge the public’s interest in such a project. What they came up with was a three-part group: middle and high school students who would use it in their studies, media who needed factual information for stories, and tourists.

Now a self-proclaimed missionary for NGE who travels to rotary club meetings and community gatherings discussing the Web site, Zainaldin says the main challenge is maintaining support. Office space in UGA’s main library is extremely important, as is continued funding from the legislature and private sources.

“Everyone sees the value of the project throughout the state and provides support,” says Inscoe. “But support works both ways. We have links on the NGE directly to their Web sites, so we bring new audiences to agencies, institutions, businesses, and museums that might otherwise not be known about.”

Future plans include reaching out to high school classrooms in the areas of science, music and arts, not just history.

Currently, the NGE is unique and has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities and others as a nationally pioneering Web-based initiative.

“Other states—Alabama, North Carolina, Nevada and New York—are trying to get their own Web sites started and have been talking with us about our experiences,” says Inscoe. “But they don’t seem to have the same level of support from the government, the corporate and foundation world or academia as we enjoy here.”

If NGE really catches on in schools and more teachers like Geri Collins begin using it, the legislature will know they are supporting a winner.

“This is a very, very good tool,” says Collins. “Theoretically, the NGE could be a self-standing curriculum, only using textbooks as a reference. It’s that fantastic.”

That’s music to Zainaldin’s ears.

“The New Georgia Encyclopedia is jazzy and accessible,” he says. “We walk a fine line between the integrity of a book and the flashiness of an interactive Web site. If kids come to the site and can’t find what they want—or don’t stay interested—we’ve lost them. You get the sense that this is an encyclopedia, but that you’re going to enjoy it. So just sit back and enjoy the ride!”

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