I was one of a generation of kids who learned to spell e-n-c-y-c-l-o-p-e-d-i-a from Jiminy Cricket, the nattily-dressed animated character who first appeared in the 1940 Walt Disney cartoon, “Pinocchio.”

The wise and comical talking insect accompanies Pinocchio on his adventures and serves as his official conscience. He was voiced by Cliff Edwards through the 1960s, and later by Eddie Carroll. Jiminy Cricket’s most famous song, voiced by Edwards, was “When You Wish Upon a Star.”

Fittingly enough, I found all these facts in an encyclopedia, not from a multi-volumed print set, but online. The classic books of knowledge, once a staple of thousands of households, are now migrating to the Internet, according to New York Times reporter Noam Cohen. The encyclopedia “is well on its way to becoming the first casualty in the end of print.”

That may be so, says Reference Librarian Donna Bacon, who works at the Library Center, but the Springfield-Greene County Libraries still have a set of World Book encyclopedias at each branch.

“We buy them every other year,” says Bacon. “They are not quite gone yet. The print encyclopedias still get a lot of use by our patrons in the buildings. We continue to monitor their usage and re-evaluate the need to buy them. I imagine one day there will be a total shift away from print and toward online, but we’re not quite there yet at our libraries.”

Yes, online encyclopedias are convenient, handy and useful. Bacon recommends Answers.com. “This site uses reputable sources for their encyclopedia-type entries. The reference content is derived from publishers known for their accuracy and reliability.”

Information on the site’s four million topics is updated frequently and it’s easy to find what you need, either via a search box, or by linking to a list of 18 subjects, from Arts to Zoology. Under each topic are hundreds of subtopics.

So, if you’re wishing for the classic print encyclopedia, it’s there but it’s in cyberspace, too.

A Sampling of Online Encyclopedias

• Encarta.msn.com

• Encyclopedia Smithsonian: si.edu/encyclopedia

• Go.grolier.com

• Columbia: Sixth Edition: Encyclopedia.com

• Infoplease.com

• Britannica.com

• Wikipedia.org

Jeanne Duffey, community relations director for the Springfield-Greene County Library District, can be reached at jeanned@thelibrary.org.