The strength of multi-media text searching is as much in finding what is not there than what is. CD-ROM encylopedias, with powerful searching, reveal their weaknesses just as quickly as their strengths. Here, Gough Whitlam would agree. He does not rate a full entry in World Book Information Finder on CD. He would be incensed that Malcolm Fraser does and if you search for “”Whitlam” you are directed to that entry. Unlike the book version, a searcher does not look under the volume “”W” to see if Whitlam is mentioned and then thumb through an index lugging out one volume then another. Rather the computer scans the full text of the encylopedia for “”Whitlam” and produces the results: Whitlam does not have the grandeur of his own entry. Rather he is dismissed in the entry under Fraser and Australian politics.
Stephen Hawking gets a brief history. Beethoven gets noted in 11 articles: 56 times under his own name, 11 under symphony, 5 under another article and then once or twice in the rest. The resource-number box notes there are 56 times and lets you click back and forth between them. I have now messed around with three CD-ROM encyclopedias. Microsoft’s Encarta, Encyclopedia Britannica and the latest, World Book. World Book sits between the other two for price and content. Each is on one CD. For text content Britannica leads, World Book is next and Encarta last with very large gaps between them.
I don’t pretend to have read all of them, after all World Book has 17,000 articles (20 million words) and a 225,000-word dictionary. Britannica has more than double that. Rather the assessment is made on sampling. However, the computer pages is not the place to review the content of encyclopedias, rather it is the place for a review of the software. For use of computer graphics the three encyclopedias, only Encarta has moving pictures and sound, but they are a waste of precious space on the CD. Does it matter whether Martin Luther King is heard to say he had a dream while his lips move, especially if it takes up the space of 10,000 words? A still picture and text is enough. Britannica is a text-only pilot version. The real thing with pictures is promised next year.
World Book had text-only versions in the past; 1994 was its first graphics version. It has an annual update by disc exchange for $199. The price goes up with value of content, not with the prettiness of the pictures. Britannica is $1850; World Book is $499 or $249 when added to a set of the books Encarta, though the cheapest at under $200 or free with many new-computer packages is not a serious research option. It may help some Year 1-5 students, but it has errors (pointed out on these pages a few weeks ago) and easily discoverable deficiencies, like no words beginning with “”scler” anywhere in the text _ no sclerophyll or sclerosis. Word Book does not have sclerophyll anywhere in its text either, but has half a dozen words beginning with “”scler”.
Full-text searching will always beat the best printed index in the world, that is what makes the latest computer technology so good. However, the printed book still has some advantages _ you can curl up with it and carry anywhere. Still book versions cost a lot more. World Book book version is $1149 and the CD is $499. Britannica’s books are a couple of thousand dollars more than the CD, as is the full Oxford Dictionary, but various book-CD packages are available for those who need paper to believe it is real. World Book is throwing in the CD with the book version this month. Normally it is $249 with the books or $499 on its own. World Book’s reference software links the articles with atlas, dictionary, picture gallery, “”InfoTree” and time line.
Thus the atlas starts with a map of the world, the gallery with four screens of 10 categories and the InfoTree with a dozen headings for main branches of human knowledge. The reader can then click down to more detailed levels and at any stage call up the related article. Thus all the pictures, maps and diagrams are at once separate collections with related articles on call. At any stage you can click on a word and the dictionary definition appears in a quarter-sized window. This linking saves time when looking for specific knowledge and entices further reading. I think the days of the book encyclopedia are over. The more so because updates on CD are not made with clumsy unintegrated year books, but by complete replacement CDs.