In the short story “The Library of Babel” Lois Jorge Borges distinguishes between different ways of perceiving issues of interpretation: the “purifiers” try to destroy every book that is meaningless while the “inquisitors” seek the canonical Book of books that reveals the meaning of all the others; it “is the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest” (Borges 1941/1962). This perfect compendium is something that has not only attracted the mythological librarian, The Man of Books, as described by Borges, but also to a high degree people of today (Keller 2011).

There are obvious gains of publishing a handbook or an encyclopedia from a market perspective, but what are the gains from a research perspective? Who will undertake such a work, what would be the scholarly motives of the editors working on it, how is that work carried out and what mechanisms shape the content of it? By investigating the archives of one of the most ambitious Encyclopedias of education, The International Encyclopedia of Education, IEE 1985 (cf. Phillips et al 1986), I will explore issues related to the construction of canonical texts. The main purpose of the paper is to provide an understanding of the re/production of canonical knowledge of education. In the paper I will investigate these topics with help from an archive material consisting of meeting protocols and editorial correspondence from the Torsten Husén archive in Stockholm National Archives. Husén was the Editor in Chief for the IEE together with Postlethwaite (Husén, T. & Postlethwaite 1985).

There exist of course several guidelines on how to edit encyclopedias (e.g. Aschmore 1962, Sillis 1969, Beede 2001, Edwards 2012), but it is difficult to find research about the actual work of editing such books. Most of what can be found is biographical notes.

Investigating the becoming of an encyclopedia can probably best be resembled to the work carried out within the Sociology of knowledge and/or History of knowledge. These shall not be considered as coherent research disciplines but for this paper some traits from them are particularly relevant. One basic assumption is that knowledge (in an encyclopedia) is human knowledge – it is produced under social and historical circumstances and reflects society and particular needs (Charle, Schriewer and Wagner 2004, Schriewer, J. & Martínez 2004, Wagner and Wittrock 1991).

If we accept encyclopedic knowledge as a reflection of certain needs and developed within certain systems, we can expect the encyclopedia to be part of also a larger educational socio-political context. To put it differently, it is not only “truth criteria” (or the preservation/development of knowledge) that can be expected as reasons to produce an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias can be treated as we treat other kinds of historical knowledge. We have knowledge practices that develop and change over time, but that always are preoccupied by gathering, analysing, disseminate and employ knowledge. We accumulate, refine and dived knowledge; we loose knowledge or reject knowledge. Knowledge is geographical, sociological and chronological (cf. Burke 2012). In other words we can expect editors of an encyclopedia to struggle with geographical and periodical frames as well as issues of deciding on relevance and limitations of content (and of authors).

The main questions answered in the paper are: What kinds of processes, decisions, problems and relations can we find behind an encyclopedia, including the idea of making it at the first place? If and how does these circumstantial conditions in the re/production of knowledge to the IEE effect the structure of it and the final content?

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