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Mennonite Encyclopedia Project Progressing Along the Information Superhighway

GOSHEN, Indiana (USA) — When the Mennonite Encyclopedia first came out in the late 1950s, computers were largely the stuff of science fiction. Half a century later, a group of Canadian and U.S. volunteers are halfway toward their goal of making the five-volume reference work accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. And they hope for connections around the world.

Called GAMEO (www.gameo.org), or Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, the website currently makes available nearly 7,500 articles from the print version. With more articles being added weekly, managing editor Sam Steiner estimates that the Mennonite Encyclopedia’s 14,000-plus entries will be online by the end of 2008.

But Steiner and his colleagues don’t plan on stopping there. The goal is to update existing articles and add new ones for 21st-century readers and researchers.

“GAMEO fills a gap on the web by providing a quick source of reliable information on Anabaptists and Mennonites in a one-stop location,” said Steiner, who is librarian and archivist at Conrad Grebel University College in Waterloo, Ontario (Canada). “It is built on the magnificent resource of the print Mennonite Encyclopedia but is not bound by space or time as print publications are.”

An estimated 10 percent of the articles online have been updated, such as using updated population and membership numbers, and occasionally adding an illustration. More than 1,000 articles are new, particularly entries from some Canadian historical databases.

GAMEO is an inter-Mennonite, international initiative, supported by the Mennonite Historical Society of Canada, the Mennonite Brethren Historical Commission, the Mennonite Church USA Historical Committee, Mennonite Central Committee and Mennonite World Conference. U.S. and Canadian editorial committees are responsible for the content, while a binational management committee oversees the entire project.

Pakisa Tshimika, Mennonite World Conference associate general secretary from the Democratic Republic of Congo now based in California, represents Mennonite World Conference on the committee. The board agreed in January that a voice from the Global South is a necessary addition.

The process so far has been quite simple. The entire encyclopedia has been scanned and volunteers do minor editing, updating and formatting before sending the final articles to Steiner or Richard Thiessen, GAMEO assistant managing editor. Thiessen is library director at Columbia Bible College in Abbotsford, British Columboa (Canada). The editors post the articles online and create links between them.

GAMEO organizers invite other researchers and writers to contribute. If they don’t see an article on something of interest, Steiner said, they may send pertinent information to him or draft an article based on a template found on the website.

New technology costing $8,000 is required to incorporate such efforts. “We’ve raised $1,000 thus far and need at least $6,000 in hand before we can move ahead with the [computer] conversion,” Steiner said.

More than 1,200 visitors go to the GAMEO site each day, and Steiner says he receives several emails a day with questions about something people have found on the site. Most are from the United States and Canada, but an increasing number are coming from outside North America. And that pleases Steiner and his GAMEO colleagues, who eventually want to offer content in languages other than English.

“GAMEO should be a resource that helps bind together the worldwide Mennonite communion,” he said.

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PROJECT’S JOURNEY STARTED A CENTURY AGO

GAMEO can trace its lineage back to Germany a century ago. In the early 1900s German Mennonite leaders Christian Hege and Christian Neff began compiling the Mennonitisches Lexikon, an encyclopedia covering the movement since its origins. The first volume was published in 1913. (Disrupted by war and financial problems, the Lexikon wasn’t completed until 1967.)

American Mennonite scholars in the 1940s conceived of the Mennonite Encyclopedia as an extension and translation of the Lexicon. The project soon mushroomed well beyond its European counterpart, resulting in four volumes published between 1955 and 1959 and a fifth volume in 1990.

In 1996, the Mennonite Historical Committee of Canada started putting information from a database created for the three-volume Mennonites in Canada series online, then began adding pertinent entries from the Mennonite Encyclopedia. The project expanded two years ago with the addition of the Mennonite Church USA Historical Committee and Mennonite Brethren Historical Commission as partners.

— Rich Preheim, director; Mennonite Church USA Historical Committee