We use them all the time, but ever wonder how reference books and resources get put together?
In a guest post today, Donald Kraybill offers a peek into the writing and research process for the Concise Encyclopedia of Amish, Brethren, Hutterites, and Mennonites:
Compiling the Concise Encyclopedia was a daunting task. In fact if I had known at the beginning what I know now about its complexity, I probably would not have undertaken it. In 2001, I published Anabaptist World USA (Herald Press). As the title suggests that book focused exclusively on the United States. As I was completing it I thought it would be helpful to have a single volume that included the United States and Canada and short essays on a variety of topics. And so I came up with the idea of a Concise Encyclopedia and in conversations with the editors at Johns Hopkins University Press, they were eager to publish it. So it’s been a 10 year project!
As I got into the project the editors at Johns Hopkins said that if it covers North America it must include all of the Caribbean and Central America countries as well as Mexico. That was a major challenge because it’s been about 30 years since I have been in Central America and so I needed to gather information by e-mail and telephone with personal contacts and Anabaptists leaders in the various countries. It also complicated the writing process because most of the Anabaptist churches in the United States and Canada have of course a European ethnic background. Many of the Central American, Caribbean and Mexican churches have Hispanic or indigenous backgrounds and speak a variety of languages. So the expansion beyond the borders of Canada and United States made the project much more challenging!
Personally, the project was also complicated and challenging because it meant I needed to gather and master information on some 200 groups and on dozens of topics which I really had little familiarity and was not expert on. Then I needed to summarize the information in a concise and readable fashion.
It was also difficult to know which topics to include. Is the Beard important enough to merit its own entry? Does anyone really care about beards? What about Prayer? It’s an important element of the religious life of these communities, but what exactly does one say about it? What about quilts, television, iPods? As you can imagine the list of prospective topics could easily rocket into the thousands. In any event I ended up with about 350 and I’m pretty pleased with the selection at this point.
One of the complications working on a book like this is that churches and people are always changing and in flux. We tried to update a number of things quickly as the deadline for submission approached. For example, we quickly added a sentence or so about the Haiti earthquake in January 2010 to the entry on the country of Haiti. To give another example, the major Mennonite organization Mennonite Mutual Aid (MMA), changed its name to Everence in the spring of 2010. So we made that change but then had to go through all the other essays and searching for MMA replace it with Everence.
Another question we struggled with was photos. Some people thought we should include them. But when you have 200 groups how do you adequately represent all of these groups and photographs. If you don’t have a photograph for each group and focus just on Amish and Hutterites it intends to bias the presentation towards that particular group. So in the end we decided not to include any photographs. But we do have a number of tables, maps, charts, and lists of resources related to things like Anabaptist-related colleges, publishers, and information centers. We also have an extensive list of references for additional research at the end. The whole idea was to create a resource which would be user-friendly and helpful to people looking for a portal into the Anabaptist world.
I’m delighted and also relieved that it’s finished and now I’m eager to get on to other things.
Donald Kraybill is Senior Fellow at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College.
If you missed the original interview and book giveaway contest, find it here.
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Sign me up for the Kraybill book drawing, Erik. Thanks for keeping us informed on the latest books, events, and musings. Keep up the good work.
P.S. I attended Don Kraybill’s presentation last night at the Elizabethtown College Young Center. His talk on Amish spirituality came from his research and writing (along with Steve Nolt and David Weaver/Zercher)for their recent book, “The Amish Way: Patient Faith in a Perilous World.” As usual, his presentation was excellent and well received by the appreciative audience. I took fairly careful notes and would be willing to share them with anybody who would like to see them. Contact me at rstevick@messiah.edu. BTW, I liked your review of “The Amish Way” on Amazon.com. Rich Stevick, Messiah College. Grantham, PA 17027
I find the comment above offensive. There is no need to be so totally gross. A simple explanation of your viewpoint would have been enough.
Karen, I totally agree with you.
Thank you for your explanation as to what when in to writing this book. I am sure I will enjoy reading it, as I have the interview and all the posts here on this blog.
I care about the extensive research and work that went into publishing a book like this. We are fortunate to have access to this information. For me, its more about knowledge than opinion. I suppose we can’t say the same about some posts.
Karen, Linda, Elizabeth, I just had a chance to read the comments and of course agree with you that that comment was pretty offensive. I’ve deleted it.
I have got an automatic program that catches and blocks comments with vulgar words, etc, but unfortunately it can’t catch everything.
And Elizabeth, Karen, I am with you–I am pretty impressed by the amount of work it must have taken to do this book. And to keep going on one project for 10 years I think is beyond my attention span! 🙂
Professor Stevick, great to get your thoughts here and have got you signed up. That must have been a great talk and I’ll be sure to get in touch.