Encyclopaedia Beliana

The Encyclopaedia Beliana is a general Slovak encyclopaedia which has been published in print since the late 1990s by the Encyclopedic Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. It is comprised of articles about science, technology, society and the humanities with a focus on articles related to Slovak realities. The list of contributors comprises of hundreds of authors and reviewers from universities and scientific institutions not only from Slovakia and the Czech Republic but also from other countries. Until now, 9 volumes with about 80,000 articles have been printed, alphabetically covering the range from A to kraj. Beliana has been available on the Internet since 2018. Because the first volume was published in 1999, numerous articles were updated and revised. The editorial team is currently working in parallel to produce another volume of the Encyclopedia Beliana as well as to prepare the Internet version. The process of publishing old articles available in print continues concurrently along with the publishing of new articles.

The text of Beliana articles is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. The licensing terms of illustrations are stated along with each illustration.

The publishing of Beliana content on the Internet would not be possible without the extensive help of members of the Society for Open Information Technologies (SOIT), who have developed a web-based editorial system free of charge and have analyzed, converted and imported the texts of nearly 75,000 published articles and about 100,000 articles that have not been processed yet. Both the Beliana website and the editorial system have been built using the open-source content management system Drupal and the source code is available in the software repository of the Encyclopedic Institute on github.com.