Encyclopædia Britannica Gallery

An early home page from Britannica Online. For the first web-based encyclopedia in 1994, I coordinated the work of editors, programmers, and designers to create a streamlined interface focused on searching, browsing, and links to special features.

One of the most popular features on Britannica Online was "Britannica's Lives," which allows the user to enter any day, such as a birthday, and see who was born on that day among Britannica's thousands of biographies. For instance, I share a birthday with bank robber Willie Sutton and boxer Mike Tyson.

One of several early specialty spinoff sites, this site celebrated Shakespeare and commemorated the rebuilding of the Globe Theatre in London in 1997. The site was later spun off as a CD-ROM product.

The top of an early search results screen from Britannica Online. Each result was accompanied by the beginning of the article, an illustration (if available), and "Related Resources," which included links to other Britannica references, as well as web sites chosen by Britannica's editors. The goal at the time was to create "an intelligent person's Yahoo!" (before Google was around).

The "Nations of the World" feature was a very early hotspotted map system of all continents, regions, and countries, with links to thousands of geographical articles. One fifth of all Britannica articles were geographic.

Britannica Online's related Internet resources evolved into the Britannica Internet Guide, and eventually into what is now Britannica.com. I wrote early strategic plans for this project and led initial marketing efforts.

For the two-disc Britannica CD, we leveraged the content from Britannica Online and served most of the product through an embedded web browser. I managed planning and scheduling in my role as liaison with Britannica's Advanced Technology Group.

With more than 72,000 articles, and links to cross-references, index entries, images, interactive media, and related web sites, Britannica CD had more than 1.5 million hypertext links.

Timelines in Britannica CD allowed users to view events from one field of study alongside those in another. Other features included Spectrum (a topical outline), Compass (an interactive atlas), and Analyst (a geographical report-builder).

Britannica Classics demonstrated the company's unique heritage by showing articles by famous authors. Other "Spotlight" features, such as "The Olympics" and "The American Civil War," were used on both CD and online, and were chosen as "Cool Sites" by Yahoo!