Encyclopedia Organization

While reading a book over the weekend (Everything Is Miscellaneous, since you asked), I got to thinking about the best way to organize the Disneyland encyclopedia. (Recall that the encyclopedia is the first volume of the Disneyland Compendium, which will have other types of reference material.) Now, you may wonder why this is even a concern at all. Encyclopedias have only one order--alphabetical. Start with A Ticket, continue through Festival Mexico and Ralke Company, and end with Zorro Day. Nothing simpler, right?

Alphabetical ordering is essentially random. Sometimes things are grouped together that make sense, but just as often these proximate relationships don't mean anything. To take a few sequential terms from the thesaurus:

Chessir, Leeds
Chester Drawer's
Chevron
Chevron Hospitality Room
Chicago Railroad Fair
chicken (food)

For the past couple of days I have contemplated organizing the encyclopedia conceptually, just as the thesaurus is. That is, you might find a linear organization pattern like this (very rough):

Disneyland Resort
- Disneyland Park
-- Main Street, U.S.A.
--- Town Square
---- Opera House
-- Tomorrowland
--- Tomorrowland Entrance
--- Cicarama, U.S.A.
--- Circle-Vision 360
--- World Premiere Circle-Vision
--- Rocket Rods
--- Buzz Lightyear Astro-Blasters

There are a number of things to consider here, and paramount must be useability. I think if we do go a conceptual route (like that above or something else), we'd also have an alphabetical index of terms. We would need clear headers on each page, so you know where you are in the structure; together with that, we would need to provide conceptual outlines at the beginning of each chapter or section. The geographic section would be the longest, but there would be sections for other entities, like the organizational structure of the Resort, or types of entertainment events (and, of course, entries for the events themselves, like individual parades and shows).

We wouldn't necessarily escape alphabetization entirely. We would have to decide how to sort within each category. With a small land like Adventureland, is it worthwhile to try to group entries next to each other (like entries for the Tahitian Terrace and Aladdin's Oasis, then terms related to the Jungle Cruise, then the Indiana Jones Adventure, then the Swiss Family Treehouse and Tarzan's Treehouse) or would it look effectively random? (We would not be lumping Tahitian Terrace and Aladdin's Oasis together, just placing the entries next to each other.) Whatever we do, we want to make sure that readers can find what they're looking for. If we try out a conceptual structure and it hides the information, we may stick with alphabetization.

What do all of you think? I realize you may not be able to answer the question without a sample, but do you see any problems off the bat with such an organization? Do you love the alphabet so much that you wouldn't purchase a book which scorned it? What sort of encyclopedia organization would work best for you?

Research Update

Generally, you can assume that a lack of posts means that I'm engaged in work on the Disneyland Compendium. (Well, that or my master's thesis--it doesn't appear to be writing itself!) The past couple of weeks I have focused on publications: Disneyland Line, Disneyland Holiday-Vacationland, Disney News-Disney Magazine, Backstage Disneyland, Disneylander, Cast Member Reference Guides, guidemaps and souvenir guidebooks, mainly. I've created a spreadsheet to track what I have immediately available to me (either a hard copy or a digital original or surrogate) and feel I now have a much better grasp of that. I still don't completely know what I'm missing because lists of these publications mostly don't exist! This work doesn't include the thousands and thousands of newspaper articles and advertisements, either. (Yes, I realize it's a bit... obsessive.)

I have a hair under 800 Disneyland Lines now (thanks to Kevin Yee sending me a couple hundred in the mail last week). From about twenty issues I've pulled out information for more than a thousand terms! There are some excellent articles in the Line about how the Park works, and I'm very excited to sift through it all.

Kevin and I still plan to have the first part of the Compendium available in about two years. Right now I'm thinking that might just be a print encyclopedia, but we haven't ruled anything out. Heck, we won't even be doing any writing for at least another year. I'll still be spending untold hours collecting the documents, making contacts, and building the thesaurus. If I disappear for brief spells, you can just think of the time you would have spent reading the blog as deferred to the publication!

We've Been Scooped!

Did you know there is a Disneyland Encyclopedia coming out on May 1? Neither did I! Its full title is The Disneyland Encyclopedia: The Unofficial, Unauthorized, and Unprecedented History of Every Land, Attraction, Restaurant, Shop, and Event in the Original Magic Kingdom (phew!). You can find it on Amazon here. This is the publisher's description:

Spanning the entire history of the park, from its founding more than 50 years ago to the present, this fascinating book profiles 500 attractions, restaurants, stores, events, and significant people from the history of Disneyland®. Each of the main entries in the book examines in detail the history of a Disneyland® landmark, including how many of the most popular attractions went through several incarnations before becoming what they are today—Tomorrowland’s Hall of Chemistry and Hall of Aluminum were transformed into the groundbreaking Adventure Thru Inner Space in 1967, and then became the popular ride Star Tours 20 years later. Read about unbuilt concepts, including Rock Candy Mountain and Chinatown, and delight in fascinating trivia about the park, such as ride statistics and attendance records. With a daily list of events, openings, and closings in the park's history, a yearly summary of attractions that came and went, simple and clear maps that correspond to the book’s 500 entries, and sidebars with additional information on each ride, this is a comprehensive and entertaining book overflowing with detail on the most-renovated, most-loved, and most-visited theme park in the world.

The author is Chris Strodder, a name previously unfamiliar to me. You can find a listing of 442 (or so) of the 500 terms and a little more description here. It looks like it focuses almost entirely on proper nouns, though there are a few generics, like restrooms or fireworks (though the latter is undoubtedly about the specific shows). I'm a little skeptical about the claim to cover "every event"--I currently have 236 events, promotions, and programs listed in the thesaurus (and I'm just getting started!). I'll be interested to see the length and scope of the entries and what sources were used in the creation of this encyclopedia. It covers just Disneyland Park--no Disneyland Hotel, Downtown Disney, Disney's California Adventure, etc. Anybody out there know more about it? Or the author?

Intro

There are some really great old-school Disneyland blogs out there. I well-remember the day I emerged from the darkness last August to discover Stuff from the Park, Gorillas Don't Blog, and Davelandblog all on the same day! While I do have some neat older photos taken by others and more modern photographs taken by myself, this will not be a photo blog. And while I do have some ephemera stretching back decades, this will not be a vintage paper blog. My stock-in-trade is information. I have recently been coming across the arcane, the bizarre, the trivial, the interesting and everything in between and wanted a place to share such stories of Disneyland.

The blog name is "Disneyland Nomenclature," but don't worry that my sole focus will be the tediousness of approved names or the correct terminology for a location or show. (House of the Future? House of Tomorrow? Monsanto Chemical House of the Future? Monsanto Home of the Future? Monsanto House of the Future? Monsanto's House of the Future? Monsanto's House of Tomorrow??) Rather, I really want to talk about the myriad details of Disneyland. I'm neither omniscient nor particularly old and thus claim no dominion over every bit of Disneyland history. It is my hope that you fans will find it interesting and entice you to share your own stories and bits of Disneyland lore (I'm looking at you Mike Cozart!).

So, what will you find on this blog? There will be stories. There will be trivia. To liven things up, I will also include photos and other documents from time to time. The Disneyland Resort is the organizing focus, from inception to the present day. As with many others, the old days hold particular appeal to me, but I have my own experiences and memories from visiting modern Disneyland that I'd like to share, too.

I must give great thanks to the photo blogs I already mentioned. My interest in Disneyland had lain dormant since my "retirement" from the Disneyland Resort in 2003. After spending so much time learning about Disneyland, I began to feel that the rewards I was getting from finding out new information didn't match up with the effort I expended doing so. And then I found loads of extraordinary photos and information presented daily by several different people! It rekindled in me a long-held desire to do a comprehensive reference work on Disneyland.

Together with Kevin Yee (with whom I have authored two Disneyland trivia books), I am engaged in research on the first part of that collection, a Disneyland encyclopedia. We are targeting the first copies to go on sale in July 2010 at the NFFC Convention. There will be more posts on the research effort in the future, including the construction of a Disneyland thesaurus/index language that is helping to keep all of our research straight.

I look forward to sharing what I know. Thursday I will have a post on the Baltimore mansion upon which the exterior of Disneyland's Haunted Mansion is based, which to my knowledge has never before been identified by name.