The July 2008 issue of the The Smithsonian magazine features the article “John Muir’s Yosemite,” about the man widely recognized as the greatest champion of that precious U.S. national park. Muir was famous even in his own day, for when the editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s tenth edition needed someone to write an article about the park, Muir was the obvious go-to guy. That article appears below.

Editor’s Introduction
John Muir knew Yosemite as perhaps no one before or since. He first came to the valley in 1868, and three years later he hosted a visit by no less a luminary than Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was still the preserve’s most ardent and eloquent defender 30 years later, when he wrote this piece for the Tenth Edition (1902-03). (In the latter year one of his disciples in the conservationist ethic, President Theodore Roosevelt, joined him for a Yosemite campout.) By the way, the Hetch-Hetchy Valley, mentioned in the last paragraph as being nearly the equal in beauty of Yosemite, is also mentioned in the current Britannica–as the Hetch-Hetchy Reservoir.

Yosemite
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Tenth Edition

YOSEMITE,a famous valley on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada of California, about 150 miles east of San Francisco and 4000 feet above the sea. It is 7 miles long, half a mile to a mile wide, and nearly a mile deep, eroded out of hard massive granite by glacial action. Its precipitous walls present a great variety of forms and sculpture, determined by the grain or cleavage of the rock–domes, gables, towers, battlements, and majestic mountain cliffs, partially separated and individualized by recesses and side cañons. The bottom, a filled-up lake basin, is level and park-like, diversified with groves of oak and pine, clumps of flowering shrubs, and spacious ferny meadows and wild gardens through which the river Merced meanders in tranquil beauty; while the whole valley resounds with the booming of its unrivalled waterfalls. The most notable of the wall rocks are: El Capitan, 3300 feet high, a sheer, plain mass of granite, the end of one of the most enduring of the mountain ridges, which stands forward beyond the general line of the north wall in imposing grandeur; the Three Brothers, North Dome, Glacier Point, the Sentinel, Cathedral, Sentinel Dome and Cloud’s Rest, from 2800 to nearly 6000 feet high; and Half Dome, the noblest of all, which rises at the head of the valley from a broad, richly-sculptured base to the height of 4740 feet. These rocks are majestic glacial monuments, illustrating on a grand scale the action of ice in mountain sculpture. For here five large glaciers united to form the grand trunk glacier that eroded the valley and occupied it as its channel. Its moraines, though mostly obscured by vegetation and weathering, may still be traced; while on the snowy peaks at the headwaters of the Merced a considerable number of small glaciers, once tributary to the main Yosemite glacier, still exist. The Bridal Veil Fall, 900 feet high, is one of the most interesting features of the lower end of the valley. Towards the upper end the great Yosemite Fall pours its white floods from a height of 2600 feet, bathing the mighty cliffs with clouds of spray and making them tremble with its thunder-tones. The valley divides at the head into three branches, the Tenaya, Merced, and South Fork cañons. In the main (Merced) branch are the Vernal and Nevada Falls, 400 and 600 feet high, in the midst of most novel and sublime scenery. The Nevada is usually ranked next to the Yosemite among the five main falls of the valley. Its waters are chafed and dashed to foam in a rough channel before they arrive at the head of the fall, and are beaten yet finer by impinging on a sloping portion of the cliff about halfway down, thus making it the whitest of all the falls. The Vernal, about half a mile below the Nevada, famous for its afternoon rainbows, is staid and orderly, with scarce a hint of the passionate enthusiasm of its neighbour. Nevertheless it is a favourite with visitors, because it is better seen than any other. One may safely saunter along the edge of the river above it, and stand beside it at the top, as it calmly bends over the brow of the precipice. At flood time it is a nearly regular sheet about 80 feet wide, changing as it descends from green to purplish grey and white, and is dashed into clouds of irised foam on a rugged boulder talus that fills the gorge below. In the south branch, a mile from the head of the main valley, is the Illilouette Fall, 600 feet high, one of the most beautiful of the Yosemite choir. It is not nearly as grand a fall as the Yosemite, as symmetrical as the Vernal, or as airily graceful as the Bridal Veil; nor does it ever display as tremendous an outgush of snowy magnificence as the Nevada; but in fineness and beauty of colour and texture it surpasses them all.

Click here to read the entire article 

Here are three related widgets you can also grab and post on your Web site or blog.  Each one has articles from the current Encyclopaedia Britannica that will give your readers information on Yosemite, national parks, and conservation. 

Britannica.com Week in Preview: July 14-20

Britannica.com’s homepage contains daily and weekly features where we place the news in context, highlight contributors and new content, quiz our readers, and profile events and biographies of the day.

Today starts a series of weekly posts that I’ll make here at the Britannica Blog that gives our readers a preview of some of the highlights of what’s to come on the Britannica site.

• As the British Open prepares to, well, open in England, Britannica proudly features all week a brand-new article on the tournament by British golfer Colin Montgomerie. Tiger Woods, who edged out Montgomerie at the 2005 Open, is out with an injury.

• July 14: While the world’s golfers are preparing to storm the sands of the Royal Birkdale, across the Channel the French will be shouting “Vive le 14 juillet!” and celebrating Bastille Day, marking 219 years since a mob stormed the prison, signaling an end to the ancien régime.

• July 15: As oil prices surge, causing major U.S. airlines to cut jobs and beg consumers to call on the U.S. Congress to pass legislation to end market speculation, which they charge has caused the spike in oil prices, the Boeing Company marks its founding in 1916.

• July 16: Speaking of destruction, on July 16 the world marks the anniversary of the atomic age. It was on this day 63 years ago that the United States’s Manhattan Project had its first succesful test. Less than a month later, atomic bombs were used to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, and bring the war in the Pacific to an end.

• July 17: If you need a little levity after reading about the atomic age, take a trip to the Magic Kingdom, which this week is celebrating its own anniversary. Fifty-three years ago the first guests entered Disneyland in Anaheim, California, realizing the fantastical dreams of showman Walt Disney. Mickey and Minnie are still going strong, with theme parks around the world, including in Orlando (U.S.), Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Paris.

• July 18: Speaking of birthdays, Nelson Mandela turns 90 this week. During his amazing life, he survived more than 27 years of imprisonment on Robben Island and helped end apartheid in South Africa without bloodshed. Celebrities and others feted the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize winner last month in London. Even singer Amy Winehouse showed up–which was perhaps an event in itself.

• July 19: A year before Mickey and Minnie sauntered through Disneyland, the first part of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was published. In the 2000s the tale was turned into a box-office smash, through the vision of director Peter Jackson and a cast including Ian McKellen, Orlando Bloom, Viggo Mortensen, and, of course, Frodo….errr…Elijah Wood.

• July 20: From Middle Earth to the Earth’s Moon, it was 39 years ago this Sunday that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the earth’s satellite, while the author of this blog kicked his pregnant mother for the first time (well, at least so goes the legend in the family).

This and other information is available this week via Britannica’s homepage. Or, you can search the site to read other articles of interest. We’ll be back next week with another preview of Britannica’s weekly content.

[Note: This post appeared originally on the Britannica Blog.]

On Friday, July 11 at 9:38pm Michael DeBakey died in Houston, Texas, of natural causes (see hospital press release). He was not only a renowned surgeon and pioneer in surgical procedures for the treatment of defects and diseases of the cardiovascular system but also an educator and international medical statesman.

We at Britannica mourn the world’s loss and consider ourselves fortunate to count him among our many illustrious contributors. Articles currently published on the Britannica site attributed to him include aneurysm and a section on the treatment of the heart in our entry on cardiovascular disease.

Among his more than 1,600 professional and lay publications is the The New Living Heart (1997). He has received numerous awards, including the Denton A. Cooley Cardiovascular Surgical Society’s lifetime achievement award (2007), and only recently he was bestowed with the highest and most distinguished civilian award given by the U.S. Congress, the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor (2008).

The world of medicine will miss Dr. DeBakey.

And, we at Britannica mourn the loss of a member of our family of scholars.

For some of what is being said about his life on the Web, see:

• Simon Alford at the Times Online
• BBC News
• Todd Ackerman and Eric Berger for the Houston Chronicle
• Anna Boyd at eFlux Media

[Note: This post appeared originally on the Britannica Blog.]

The redesigned Britannica site announced in our blog post last month is now live.  Please bear in mind that at this point the site represents simply a new look and organization created to make way for the collaborative features described in that post, which are still to come. You’ll start seeing those features a few at a time in the weeks and months ahead.  Please stay tuned, and give us any thoughts and suggestions you have.  Constructive ones are most welcome.    

You can click below for a virtual tour of the new site.  Click here to see a richer version of the same thing. 

Today we’re posting here and on the Britannica Blog a somewhat detailed overview of the new site that we will launch shortly. Instead of repeating those details here, I would like to take this opportunity to share with you how we see the future development of this site and how it fits into the current Internet publishing environment.

Much has been said lately about the collaborative nature of creating, documenting, and sharing knowledge. What is surprising about this discussion is that for some people this process seems possible only now because of the interactivity of the Internet. Others, including us at Britannica, take a different perspective, one that has historical roots. For us, the creation and documentation of knowledge has always been best achieved, and sometimes only achieved, through an intensely collaborative process.

At Britannica, for example, we’ve been working for 240 years at creating, documenting and sharing knowledge through a process in which thousands of expert contributors and dozens if not hundreds of editors work daily to produce factually correct, objective, well written, and up-to-date encyclopedia entries. Our readers have also played an important part in this process. For many years we have received and answered letters in which they have shared their points of view with us or suggested specific improvements. Recently, the volume of comments we get from readers has intensified through the direct feedback system on our site and by regular email.

So for us collaboration is not something new; it is not something we consider daring or experimental. It is something we’ve always done in creating Encyclopaedia Britannica. Obviously, we share with many the view that the Internet brings significant opportunities to make this collaborative process more inclusive, and that by doing so we will not only improve the quality of our content but also increase its reach and relevance. It should not be a surprise then that among the main objectives of our new site are to make it very easy for our contributors, other scholars, and regular readers to engage with our content by suggesting improvements to our editors; and to provide the editing tools they need to create and share their own content at the site.

The Consequences of Listening to Experts
But there are significant differences between our approach and what is popularly termed “Web 2.0.” First, and most important, we believe that the creation and documentation of knowledge is a collaborative process but not a democratic one, and this has at least three consequences.

The first one is ownership. Here I am not referring to copyright ownership but to owning the responsibility that comes with having created or documented a set of ideas or a body of knowledge. That someone is, or should be, responsible for what he or she writes and shares with others is not a new idea. It has long been part of who and what we are as humans. At the new Britannica site, we will welcome and facilitate the increased participation of our contributors, scholars, and regular users, but we will continue to accept all responsibility of what we write under our name. We are not abdicating our responsibility as publishers or burying it under the now-fashionable “wisdom of the crowds.”

The second consequence of our collaborative-but-not-democratic approach is that we recognize the voices and powers of experts. The plan for the new site goes to great lengths to increase the relationships we have with thousands of our current contributors as well as with new experts recommended or identified by the user community. We are calling this larger group our new “community of scholars.” To this special group we will provide a set of editing tools, promotional and community features, and incentive plans for them to engage with Britannica content as well as a place at the site for them to publish directly and under their own names for other Britannica users. This content created by the community of scholars will be controlled by each individual creator, and they will be responsible for deciding what feedback they accept or reject from those reading their work.

Finally, the third consequence of this approach is objectivity, and it requires experts. Certainly, objectivity is difficult to attain, but we’re committed to it. We believe that to provide lively and intelligent coverage of complex subjects requires experts and knowledgeable editors who can make astute judgments that cut through the cacophony of competing and often confusing viewpoints on a topic. In contrast to our approach, democratic systems settle for something bland and less informative, what is sometimes termed a “neutral point of view.”

Desire to Share and Participate is Strong
We also know that there are many Britannica users who, although they may not be experts in a given field, are interested in spreading knowledge and information and sharing their contributions to that effort with others. The new site will make it easy for our users to do so by making the Britannica content available for them to quote, modify, save under their name, and share it with others at the site. So regular users not only will be able to submit their suggestions to the editors of Britannica, but also create their own content or modify Britannica’s coverage under their own names and share the results with others in a special section of the site. We believe that by allowing our users the flexibility of using existing Britannica content, properly quoting or modifying it, and by doing so under their names, we will not only facilitate their ability to learn more about that topic, but also inspire in them the responsibility that comes with having created a new treatment under their name.

As we launch this important new project at Britannica, we realize that not everything will run smoothly. This new approach in publishing and engaging communities has required us to rethink almost all of our internal procedures and to invest significantly in editorial and technology resources. We apologize beforehand for any temporary malfunction that our users may experience as the new features and tools are launched in the coming weeks and months. But most important, I would like to take this opportunity to invite you to participate, to help us with your ideas about how to fulfill our mission to improve the understanding of ourselves and the universe in which we live.

Please look at the new site now in beta testing, read about the plans we have for the weeks and months ahead, and let us know what you think. And stay with us and join us as we gradually introduce the new features.

More Participation and Collaboration from Experts and Readers

Encyclopaedia Britannica is about to launch a new initiative that we’re very enthusiastic about. The main thrust of this initiative is to promote greater participation by both our expert contributors and readers. Both groups will be invited to play a larger role in expanding, improving, and maintaining the information we publish on the Web under the Encyclopaedia Britannica name as well as in sharing content they create with other Britannica visitors. A complete redesign, editing tools, and incentive programs will give expert contributors and users the means to take part in the further improvement of Encyclopaedia Britannica and in the creation and publication of their own work.

These efforts not only will improve the scope and quality of Encyclopaedia Britannica, but they’ll also allow expert contributors and readers to supplement this content with their own. The result will be a place with broader and more relevant coverage for information seekers and a welcoming community for scholars, experts, and lay contributors.

The planning of this service is almost finished, and we’ve been working on its implementation for a few months now. We are far enough along in the process to tell you about it today and invite your comments. Here are its main features. (We’ve also included thumbnail images of select features from the new site. Click to enlarge them if you’d like to get an idea of what each feature will look like.)

The Britannica Online site will become the hub of a new online community that will welcome and engage thousands of scholars and experts with whom we already have relationships. Encyclopaedia Britannica has long been written by a community of scholars from all over the world, and this distinguished group of people has always been one of our greatest assets. Today it is possible to increase the strength and size of this community online and to provide its members with incentives to become involved with Britannica on a more sustained and consistent basis.

To elicit their participation in our new online community of scholars, we will provide our contributors with a reward system and a rich online home that will enable them to promote themselves, their work, and their services; allow them to showcase and publish their various works-in-progress in front of the Britannica audience; and help them find and interact with colleagues around the world. In this way our online community of scholars not only will be able to interact with our editors and content in a more effective manner; they will also be able to share directly with Britannica’s visitors content that they may have created outside Encyclopaedia Britannica and will allow those visitors to suggest changes and additions to that content.

As part of our longstanding tradition, engaging a prominent community of scholars will continue to be a key requirement. With this new site and initiatives we will be able to recruit new members beyond our current contributor base, through recommendations from existing contributors, applications from expert communities, and by inviting select members of our user community.

Readers and users will also be invited into an online community where they can work and publish at Britannica’s site under their own names. Interested users will be able to prepare articles, essays, and multimedia presentations on subjects in which they’re interested. Britannica will help them with research and publishing tools and by allowing them to easily use text and non-text material from Encyclopaedia Britannica in their work. We will publish the final products on our site for the benefit of all readers, with all due attribution and credit to the people who created them. The authors will have the option of collaborating with others on their work, but each author will retain control of his or her own work.

Encyclopaedia Britannica will continue to form the core base of knowledge and information on the site, though the material created by contributors and the user community, which each member will control and be credited for, will be published alongside the encyclopedia. Encyclopaedia Britannica itself will continue to be edited according to the most rigorous standards and will bear the imprimatur “Britannica Checked” to distinguish it from material on the site for which Britannica editors are not responsible.

However, our new editing tools, user interface and reward system will facilitate and motivate expert contributors and readers alike to suggest text changes, updates, photos, videos, bibliographies, Web links and other reference materials and improvements to Encyclopaedia Britannica itself. All such suggestions will be considered by editors, and if they’re found to have merit they’ll be fact-checked and vetted before they’re published. Anyone whose contributions are accepted for publication will be credited in detailed article-history pages in the encyclopedia.

Two things we believe distinguish this effort from other projects of online collaboration are (1) the active involvement of the expert contributors with whom we already have relationships; and (2) the fact that all contributions to Encyclopaedia Britannica’s core content will continue to be checked and vetted by our expert editorial staff before they’re published.

In this way we aim to leverage the power of the Internet to integrate the work of many people in a common project and on a large scale, but without relinquishing the editorial oversight that makes Britannica’s content trustworthy.

The Britannica Online Web site has been redesigned to prepare for the introduction of these new features, and while the redesigned site is not finished, we would like to give you a glimpse of it now and invite your thoughts and feedback. You can preview the new site, which is still in beta testing, at http://www.britannica.com/bps/home. A portion of the people who visit Britannica Online today are being routed to this site and are using it now; soon it will replace our current site at www.britannica.com entirely, and the new features we have described above will be introduced in the weeks and months ahead.

[Please see comments related to this post by Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.]

At a gala reception in San Francisco Tuesday night, two Britannica Web sites each received one of the most sought-after honors in the digital publishing business.  I hope you won’t mind if I crow about it just a bit. 

The host of the event was the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA); the honors bestowed: the Codie Awards, which “celebrate achievement and vision in software, education technology and digital content.”

That night, Britannica Online School Edition, our K-12 school site, was named “Best Education Reference or Search Service,” while our blog (the main one, not the one you’re reading now), took the top spot in the “Best Corporate Blog” category.

Naturally, we’re thrilled.

You can see a list of all of this year’s Codie Award winners here.  And if you haven’t been to the Britannica Blog, please take a look.

“The nation’s founders originally intended the presidency to be a narrowly restricted institution,” says the Encyclopaedia Britannica about the highest political office in the United States.

Those founders would, to say the least, be surprised if they could see what has happened to the presidency since then.

The office, whose occupant the article goes on to say is “arguably the most powerful elected official in the world,” has undergone significant changes since George Washington took the oath in 1789.  Today, as Americans prepare to elect the country’s 44th chief executive, you can get extensive background on the presidency and its history from Britannica, and, if you have a Web site of your own, provide those same resources to your readers with links to Britannica’s material. 

Highlights:    

• “presidency of the United States of America,” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.  An extensive treatment on the office of the presidency, its powers and duties, its history, and transformation in the 20th century. 
• “Encyclopaedia Britannica Profiles the American Presidency,” a special Web site that focuses on the institution as well as on presidential campaigns and elections.  It includes bios of the presidents, vice presidents, and first ladies; vote tallies from every election; photos of campaign memorabilia; and special essays by presidential scholars.   It’s fun to browse this site, and you’ll probably learn some things you didn’t know.  Did you realize, for example, that Ulysses S. Grant’s main opponent in 1872 was newspaper mogul Horace Greeley?  That the Prohibition Party was a significant presence in the election of 1928 (and that the Prohibition Party still exists)?  
• Articles on the three remaining major candidates in this year’s election: Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Barack Obama.

You can link from your own site to any of these features, or download this widget, with a collection of Britannica articles on the presidency, and post it on your site.  Your visitors will be able to click on the links and access the articles in their entirety.  

April would have been a good time to talk about Shakespeare, it being the month both of his birth and death, but, alas, April’s lease has expired. Fortunately, however, the Bard is never out of season, so for those of you who want to delve into the life and work of the great playwright and poet or read up on him in preparation for summer stock, here goes.

Britannica has an extensive article on Shakespeare that covers his life and work and place in literary history. It also takes up the intriguing question of whether Shakespeare actually wrote his own plays, a hot topic among these days. Principal contributors to the article Shakespeare scholars John Russell Brown, Terence John Bew Spencer, and David Bevington.

We also have a The Encyclopaedia Britannica Guide to Shakespeare, a special multimedia site devoted entirely to Shakespeare and his work. It has additional articles and audio and video clips of performances.

And, of course, this widget that you can put on your own site, which has links to Britannica’s coverage of Shakespeare and related topics.
 
On the Web:

The Shakespeare Authorship Page. These folks believe Shakespeare really wrote Shakespeare.

The Electronic Text Center. Various editions available in digital form. http://etext.virginia.edu/shakespeare

Shakespeare Resource Center. Large collection of links to Shakespeare material around the Web. http://www.bardweb.net/

Folger Shakespeare Library. Washington, D.C.-based center for research on the Bard and his times.

The volume of information on the Web makes it virtually impossible to find anything without the use of Search Engines. Increasingly we are using the search engine for all our information needs, and therefore what we find is getting ever more dependent on how search engines rank their results.

Search engines use various factors to rank their results, but the single most important factor is how many web sites link to a particular page. That is, Search Engines look at each link to a page as a vote of confidence for that page and ranks the most popular pages at the top. This works most of the time, but it has a significant limitation. Once a page climbs towards the top of the list for a specific search, more people find it, and therefore more people are likely to link to that same page. In other words, once a page reaches a high rank, it has a natural tendency to climb higher. Apart from this technical limitation, we also know that when it comes to reliable and useful information, popularity is not always the only or best indicator. If popularity decided truth then we’d still believe that the sun rotates around the earth.

Recognizing that this one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t satisfy everyone’s needs, Google is gradually moving towards “Personalized Search”, where the search results you see for a particular search term are going to be slightly different from what everyone else sees. The first step towards that is a feature called “Google Subscribed Links”. This allows each of us to impose our own preferences and needs on Google’s generic search results. Using this anyone can let Google know of the content providers they trust and Google then makes sure that results from these selected sites would come up on the first page of their results. For example, if you consider Encyclopaedia Britannica as one of your trusted source, all you have to do is to go to this page and click on the “Subscribe” button next to “Encyclopaedia Britannica”. If you don’t have an account on Google then you will have to create one using your existing e-mail address.

Once you subscribe to this feature, any time you search on Google for any topic where Britannica has an article, this will be offered to you as a special search result on the first page of Google results (currently the fourth result on the first page). Since it doesn’t affect the search results in any other way, there is absolutely no harm in keeping it there. So, give it a try and you won’t regret it. Let Google’s search results reflect your personal needs.

Click on this link to add Britannica to your personalized Google results