The Berkshire Experience

The goal of a reference work is to provide extensive consistent general coverage. To provide such coverage internationally is difficult to impossible on almost all the topics Berkshire has worked on.  This internationality is not only about the topics we include; it has to do with the authors we recruit and the voices and perspectives we include. For the Encyclopedia of Modern Asia we had 700 authors in 65 countries, for example. Our staff and editors are accustomed to working with non-native-English-speaking scholars, and we happily face the communication challenges of this international approach. One of the remarkable aspects of this type of international development is that we often manage to gather information that did not exist in any form. But this also means that we have to spend considerable time to identify, convince,  stimulate and be stimulated by  potential contributors  belonging to different political, academic and writing cultures.  This contribution will explore some of the issues we have to face when we deal with China or the Middle East, or with American sensitivities about how other people see them. It will also consider the perhaps more trivial but equally important  work we do when  we  need to persuade people to push their coverage further, or when we accept that  their  decentering suggestions  upset our professional routines. This will draw from the experience gathered in publishing Encyclopedia of world sports, Encyclopedia of world history, Encyclopedia of World environmental history, Encyclopedia of Modern Asia, Global Perspectives on the United States.