Where is there a site with collective information from 1900 to now, with dates, sources, info, etc on it? I havent seen anything quite like that.
No, but someone could just say "Wikipedia" and then turn their brains off.
The Internet, while it hasn't totally destroyed the reference book market (of the type you describe and which I fondly remember), it has cut into interest and sales sufficiently that if a publisher is interested in putting out such a book, it usually ends up costing something like $50 or $75 because they know they'll only sell a few copies. Although no one has come out and said it (and I bet if any Simon & Schuster people are still on this BBS they might come back claiming the contrary), it's probably due to sites like Memory Alpha that we never saw a third edition of the Star Trek Encyclopedia or the Chronology. Or, well, updated versions of the types of reference books you describe.
All this will come back to bite fandom in the ass, I can say with 100% confidence, because as illustrated above you can still dig out a copy of those old reference books, decades after they're printed. There is zero guarantee that any of these websites will exist 5 years from now, yet alone 40. Immature people will come back and say "who cares about 40 years from now" while those of us who know better will just smile and nod gently.
With permanent media being shunted aside in favor of downloads and non-physical media, it's gonna be a real bitch to be an historian, or archivist, in 75 years. Hell, 15 years. And I'd bet money on that.
Alex
