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The Academic American Encyclopedia is a multivolume general English-language encyclopedia, and the first multimedia encyclopedia.

Its multivolume printed edition contains about 30 thousand articles written by in-house editorial staff and some 2,500 professors at prestigious U.S. universities and colleges. The length of articles is 500 words or less, except for major survey articles. In its scope and depth of coverage, the Academic American falls somewhere between the World Book Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. Bibliographies are appended to 40% of the articles. It is the most heavily cross-referenced of any comparable encyclopedia. The source also contains an index volume comprised of over 200,000 entries.

Publisher: Danbury, Conn. : Grolier, ©1997

Academic American Encyclopedia is also published in electronic form on CD-ROM, offering the complete text of the Academic American Encyclopedia, more than 33,000 articles. It also includes illustrations, photographs, animated maps, music, and video. It can be browsed or searched by topic or keyword.

The full text of the encyclopedia was actually available online to 200 homes in Columbus, OH in 1980, in cooperation with an experiment sponsored by OCLC. A year later, the text was available to subscribers of the New York Times Information Bank, The Dow-Jones online service, and CompuServe. An interactive version, including illustrations, video and audio stored on videodisk was shown at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1982. Being first published in 1985, it became the first multimedia encyclopedia ever. In 1992, Grolier (who had published the 1985 CD-ROM edition) launched their own encyclopedia on CD-ROM.

For more information see Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia

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• Grolier online