CHICAGO, July 21 (UPI) -- Chicago-based Encyclopedia Britannica reportedly is returning to its old advisory board format to meet growing challenge from online competitors.
The board format, coming after a lapse of a decade, will be made up of 15 members who, says top editor Dale Hoiberg, will be "some of the smartest people on earth," including four Nobel laureates and two Pulitzer Prize holders, the Boston Globe reported.
The company hopes the prestige and knowledge of the members will help reassert the authority of an encyclopedia, first published in 1768, the report said.
In the past, board members have included the likes of Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud and George Bernard Shaw.
The effort is also in response to concerns of librarians, teachers, and scholars, who say students pull information from anywhere online and accept it as valid, without much consideration of the source.
The new board will meet twice a year to plot the direction for Britannica and fine-tune its editorial content of about 40 million words. Staff editors will pick through the words and check the facts, but the board will have the heady task of deciding what gets in.
