Gateway Britannica

This concluding section of the history of the making of Britannica Online is more in the nature of a postscript, in that it looks at an idea that never got onto the ground, to say nothing of off it. It was an alluring vision that, from 1993 to 1995 or perhaps 1996, provided the core BOL team with a direction and much of its impetus.

From their first acquaintance with the Internet and especially with the World Wide Web, it became clear to the editors of the Britannica that they stood at the brink of a paradigm shift. (That overworked phrase is used here with no apology and no irony.) The printed and bound Britannica had customarily been imagined in the context of the individual at home, where the encyclopedia - however used - typically dominated physically the bookcase, even the room, in which it was lodged. The editors had now to imagine the encyclopedia, as it were, shelved somewhere within the Library of Congress. The electronic version, existing for the user only as momentary tracings on the computer screen, might well become merely one of countless databases available in a vast and uncharted ocean of digital information. The ATG group, from their quite different perspective, and perhaps a bit earlier, grasped exactly the same point. The motive for Gateway was their shared determination to position Britannica, not as one resource among myriads, but as an entry point of choice for all serious knowledge seekers on the Web. (One of Kester's internal presentations to senior management opened with an animated sequence in which angels tugged open a pair of ornate gates, to the accompaniment of a bit of Holst's The Planets.)

Mortimer, clearly, was a key element in the plan. Mortimer offered the promise of systematic topical and query-driven access to a body of information beyond and far more extensive than the encyclopedia itself. The encyclopedia would serve a two-fold purpose: Its content would provide basic information about topics of interest to Gateway users, while its structure would provide a means of organizing and indexing the Web at large (or that portion of the Web given over to the kinds of knowledge with which the encyclopedia was concerned). Bibliolinks would perform a parallel function with respect to physical libraries.

Using demonstrations of Mortimer to broach the subject, Kester and others held exploratory meetings with representatives of the New York Times, the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, the Grove Dictionary, among others, in an effort to understand how such diverse operations might cooperate in a Gateway project. Interest was high enough that several publishers furnished test data, as noted above. Kester worked up a detailed business plan.

The Gateway idea came to naught. In part the failure was owing to Britannica's financial difficulties. Money for ambitious projects was, of course, hard to come by, but senior managers, feeling perhaps that they could not afford a single misstep, were unable to fix upon any strategy at all. Following the sale of the company early in 1995, the new ownership was overwhelmed by immediate problems. When a strategy for the company at last emerged, it lay in quite a different direction from the Gateway vision.

Key members began leaving ATG, culminating in Kester's departure in 1999. The La Jolla office, reduced at the end to engineering annual releases of the Britannica CD, closed in 2001.