Third European Encyclopedia Conference held in Oslo

Organised by the Great Norwegian Encyclopedia, the third European Encyclopedia Conference was held in Oslo on 15–16 May, bringing together editors and publishers from eleven countries. The Miroslav Krleža Institute of Lexicography was represented by its director general, Bruno Kragić, and assistant director for research and inter-institutional cooperation, Nataša Jermen.

The first European Encyclopedia Conference was held in Brussels in 2019, organised by the Great Norwegian Encyclopedia, the European Parliamentary Research Service, and the Mission of Norway to the European Union, while the second was held in 2022 in Zagreb, organised by the Miroslav Krleža Institute of Lexicography.

At this year’s Conference, representatives of general encyclopedias from Bulgaria, Montenegro, Denmark, Croatia, Italy, Latvia, Norway, Slovakia, Sweden, and Ukraine exchanged experiences about the state of national encyclopedias and the achievements and challenges they faced since the last meeting in Zagreb in 2022. Along with the editors and publishers of European general encyclopedias, the Conference was attended by Naja Bentzen, a policy analyst in the European Parliament, who addressed the participants with an introductory presentation, ‘Encyclopedias as vehicles for knowledge diplomacy in an era of information disorder’, and Michael Coates from the University of Idaho, who gave a presentation on the history of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

This was followed by presentations by invited speakers, representatives of the Norwegian and Danish academic and professional communities, on the visibility of encyclopedias on internet search engines, the effect of artificial intelligence and language models on encyclopedias, language models and copyright, and the role of encyclopedias in scientific publishing.

Finally, a meeting of the European Encyclopedia Network was held under the chairmanship of Bruno Kragić, at which Tatiana Šrámková (Encyclopaedia Beliana) and Erik Henz Kjeldsen (lex.dk) were elected as vice-presidents, and further activities of the Network were agreed upon.