> Of course you couldn't use it as a source when writing a paper Much the same as wikipedia and similar. But, like wikipedia, they were sometimes useful start

> Of course you couldn't use it as a source when writing a paper Much the same as wikipedia and similar. But, like wikipedia, they were sometimes useful starting points with those short articles hopefully giving you a keyword or two, or a reference to other articles in the encyclopedia itself, so you had something useful to search the rest of the library (by hand or by asking the original intelligent search algorithm: a friendly librarian!) for fuller texts about. Also as a child I remember just randomly skipping to a page and finding some interesting fact, then following the references to elsewhere. I could spend hours learning random things I'd never actually need to know that way!