Children's Product Gallery

For early versions of Compton's electronic encyclopedias, I oversaw the creation of a unified coding system that enabled simultaneous publishing of print and electronic versions from a mainframe-based publishing system. This coding system was later used on web and CD-ROM versions of Britannica.

Encyclopedists were the original information architects. Compton's, like its parent product Britannica, contained a topical breakdown of subjects that unfolded electronically and displayed every article.

CD-ROM versions of Compton's contained timelines of both U.S. and world history. I directed the work involved in selecting hundreds of events—from the Big Bang to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the USSR—as well as the writing and editing of event descriptions.

During my time on Compton's, Germany re-unified, the Soviet Union collapsed, and numerous areas of the world were renamed and reorganized, all of which required thousands of text changes and the reconstruction of Compton's electronic atlas.

As Director of Product Development at Britannica, I oversaw a partnership on six educational products with VTech, a children's software and toy maker, and designers who had worked at Children's Television Workshop. The goal of products like "Inventions to Mention" was to guide young users through activities that were interwoven with educational content.

"Rusty's Adventure" was problem-based learning for six- to ten-year-olds. Rusty's owner invents a transcontinental frisbee and orders Rusty to fetch it. Children select one of three inventors to help Rusty overcome an obstacle and move along. Links to reference material and multimedia in the scrapbook help children choose the best path.

Scrapbook material helped children move forward through various activities. The scrapbook page for Leonardo da Vinci contained links to still images and video. By clicking on any image, audio file, or video clip, the selection was enlarged or played with a brief description.

With my success at building history timelines at Britannica, World Book hired me as an editorial consultant for an online feature called "Surf the Millennium," which asked what history would look like if the web were around for the past 1,000 years.