scope:

So, how does one go about building an encyclopedia? The most effective way is through a divide-and-conquer approach. Therefore I composed an Editorial Board with members who had expertise along the major knowledge areas of computing according to Association for Computing Machinery's Computing Classification System, that is:

• General and reference

• Hardware

• Computer systems organization

• Networks

• Software and its engineering

• Theory of computation

• Mathematics of computing

• Information systems

• Security and privacy

• Human-centered computing

• Computing methodologies

• Applied computing

• Social and professional topics

• People, technologies and companies I am delighted and lucky to have recruited an outstanding group of experts in their respective fields to comprise the Editorial Board listed previously. The Editorial Board members were responsible for, in consultation with and the approval of the Editor in Chief (EIC):

• Identifying articles for each of the sub-areas in their knowledge areas;

• Identifying and recruiting expert authors to write these articles;

• Organizing peer reviews of these articles;

• Collecting and editing these articles as appropriate;

• Submitting the reviewed and edited articles to the EIC for final approval and compilation. The task of finding authors was not easy.

Teasing small entries for a dictionary is much easier than extracting substantial articles for an encyclopedia, and experts are always busy. Therefore there were many false starts and stops, searches for new authors when necessary, and the need for constant encouragements. As the articles begin to be delivered by the authors, peer reviews for the articles needed to be organized. Finding expert peer reviewers, who are also busy, wasn't always easy. The articles and review reports were then returned to the authors for revision, and in many cases, another round of reviews. The process was not dissimilar to editing a special issue of a scholarly journal, only magnified by a factor of 20. The final articles then needed to be edited by expert copy editors, then returned to the authors for another check. The EIC conducted one final check. In some cases, in order to round out coverage, we mined content from other books published by Taylor & Francis and restructured that content to encyclopedia articles. This step was also time consuming as it required an analysis of hundreds of books in the T&F library. It should be no surprise, then, the process of building this Encyclopedia, from start to finish, took four years.I hope you are pleased with the result. This Encyclopedia is the result of the work of

more than 200 expert contributors and reviewers from industry and academia across the globe. We tried to be as correct and comprehensive as possible, but of course, in a work of this grand scope there are bound to be holes in coverage, as well as typographical, possibly even factual errors, I take full responsibility for these errors, and hope that you will contact me at ecst@taylorandfrancis.com to notify me of any. The good news is that this Encyclopedia is a perpetual project - the online version will be updated regularly, and new print editions are anticipated. These updated versions allow for ongoing augmentation of the Encyclopedia, to keep pace with the rapid changes in computing hardware, software, systems and applications. My intention is to keep this Encyclopedia as relevant and fresh as possible. If you have an idea for a new or revised article for the encyclopedia, please send me your thoughts. If you feel qualified to write an article, please send me a proposal along with your qualifications and will consider them and respond promptly.

The Target readership for this Encyclopedia includes computer scientists, computer engineers computing professionals, managers, software professionals, and other technology professionals. I also expect the Encyclopedia to find its way into many library databases. Finally, I hope that this Encyclopedia will be added to the reading list for Information Science undergraduate and graduate students.

Author: Phillip A. Laplante