Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, so my story starts from encyclopedia. When I was a child, there was Japanese encyclopedia in my brother's room. My father was not a researcher, but he liked to read books and magazines. My house was filled with books, magazines, and newspapers. That is one of the reason why I came to be a librarian.
I majored in German literature at university, but I could not get job, so after the graduation I entered the library school. The professors all studied library science in the U.S., so the curriculum was all American. I leaned about encyclopedia as one of the reference books. My teacher told that “an encyclopedia is a barometer of the total body of knowledge of the age in which it was created”. I was very moved by these words.
For my thesis topic, I chosed the Brockhaus, a German encyclopedia. Its first edition was published in the early 19th century, and the 17th edition came out in the mid-20th century. Therefore I extracted the word "library" from each edition and examined the evolution of its content. Then I followed the image of the "library" in the minds of Germans. As a result, I could see the library through the encyclopedia as well as the encyclopedia through the library.
So I was familiar with the encyclopedia, but after graduation I did not get job to edit encyclopedia. At the time, the encyclopedias were written by experts, and ordinary people just read them.
Original Book
- 門倉百合子『70歳のウィキペディアン：図書館の魅力を語る』東京：郵研社、2023年 (A 70-year-old Wikipedian talks about the charm of libraries / by Yuriko Kadokura. Tokyo: Yukensha, 2023)
- Chapter 1:
