The Grote Spectrum Encyclopedie ("Great Spectrum Encyclopedia") (published by Het Spectrum

Het Spectrum

Het Spectrum is a Dutch publishing house.It publishes books, under its own name and two other trade marks: Winkler Prins and Prisma. Since September 1999 Het Spectrum is a business unit within PCM Algemene Boeken....

, Utrecht

Utrecht (city)

Utrecht city and municipality is the capital and most populous city of the Dutch province of Utrecht. It is located in the eastern corner of the Randstad conurbation, and is the fourth largest city of the Netherlands with a population of 312,634 on 1 Jan 2011.Utrecht's ancient city centre features...

 between 1974 and 1980) is a Dutch

Dutch language

Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...

 encyclopedia which treats subjects in 5000 large and comprehensive articles (like the Encyclopaedia Britannica) with a clear accent on the social sciences

Social sciences

Social science is the field of study concerned with society. "Social science" is commonly used as an umbrella term to refer to a plurality of fields outside of the natural sciences usually exclusive of the administrative or managerial sciences...

. The encyclopedia is functionally illustrated and consists of 20 volumes A-Z, and four index volumes with references to lemmas within the treated subjects. The fourth index volume also contains a comprehensive bibliography (which is not included in the articles themselves). A supplement (volume 25) appeared in 1984.

The rise of new storage media in the 1990s (CD-ROM

CD-ROM

A CD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer for data storage and music playback. The 1985 “Yellow Book” standard developed by Sony and Philips adapted the format to hold any form of binary data....

, DVD

DVD

A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

) halted the plans for a second edition of the Grote Spectrum Encyclopedie. An actualised supplement did appear in 2002.