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The Encyclopædia Britannica DVD-ROM
by By Donald Rosenfield, NOCCC — cardar@home.com - November 23, 1999 at 22:58:17:
I reviewed the Encyclopædia Britannica (EB) on CD-ROM in the June 1997 issue of the Orange Bytes. Browsing through the main index, you find the Rosetta Stone. A thumbnail image is supplied on the right side of the screen along with the overview as well as a dozen links to browse. Clicking on the thumbnail gives a large, well-resolved image of the stone with its three languages. The Rosetta Stone, with Egyptian hieroglyphics in the top section, demotic characters next, and Greek at the bottom line, is in the British Museum.The Rosetta Stone is a good metaphor for this preeminent encyclopædia. It translates the history, the ideas, the personalities, and philosophies of all known civilizations into structured language that we can use in everyday life. As noted in my previous review, my wife and I have been using the Britannica in paper editions since 1960 and on metal discs since 1997.
One of the problems with using the paper edition is the physical inertia of getting up and going to it and browsing through the various heavy volumes to find what we need. I admit to doing that one to several times a week for over thirty years but that statement is self-limiting as during the process I got older (somehow) and now appreciate not having to lift all that paper.
Then we have the problem of importing the prose into the paper we are writing, or whatever project sent us to the EB in the first place. Using the CD-ROM or this new DVD-ROM allows us to cut and paste a given reference directly into our work, assuming compliance with our copyright laws, which allow citations with proper credit. Everything is at my fingertips just as the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition on CD-ROM is just keystrokes away. (What is this fascination I seem to have with all things British? I use the OED, the EB; I drive a Land Rover....)
My comments about language structure in my previous review certainly apply here. I’ll paste in the first of those but you should take a look at my earlier review to look at other examples, such as using special characters, natural-language searches, and using Boolean operators.
British Spellings—You should keep in mind that the word “Britannica” means that this is a British publication. British spellings control the Find capability. This is not a problem for those of us with many years of experience looking up subjects in the paper editions of the EB. But, newcomers have to be notified that American spellings can’t cut the mustard when they differ from the British varieties.
While writing my science books, my literary copy editor had to educate me about the differences between “toward” and “towards,” though other examples such as “color” vs. “colour” and “theater” vs. “theatre” easily come to mind.
The problem is that hitlists using American spellings may find just a few articles while the same words using British spellings may find dozens to hundreds of articles. The problem may be moot if you just look at the first few articles but at least you should be aware of it. In case you don’t know the British spelling of a given word and can’t find the reference you want, don’t despair: There is an online list of British equivalents.
Exploding Article Production —The 1997 CD-ROM had 65,000 articles. This DVD-ROM has about 73,000 articles. As a historical document, each succeeding edition of the EB can be kept as a record of human knowledge but you must use the latest edition if you want to keep up-to-date in the myriad fields of science and technology. That is, we still have and use our 1973 paper edition for hands-on knowledge about the past and our 1791 edition for its interesting compendium of mistaken assumptions about our world.
Going Online—For the latest updates in a given field you can link with the online version of the EB, using either your default Web browser or the Britannica DVD, assuming you have an ISP and a modem. That allows you to link to dozens or hundreds or thousands of websites related to the field you are researching. One reason you might choose to use the Britannica DVD instead of your browser is that allows you to combine bookmarks on the Web with those on your EB DVD to ease your research efforts.
Paper, Disc, Or Online—“Well, I can see that, Donald. But I don’t want to have to research something on the DVD only to find it superseded online and have to read it over again. If the online EB is so good why would I really need the DVD at all?”
For nights like this one, Alan; for nights like this one. Kissco’s Net Monitor tells me what I already know, that something is wrong with the @home network and I—can’t—get—online. No EB Online. No www.noccc.org. No e-mail to upload this review.
Also, If you have the paper edition it gives a certain feeling that the future is here. To lift all the paper volumes and then lovingly hold the DVD in your hands with the realization that all that is in here.
“Okay, the hard copy is necessary but EB sells both the up-to-date CD and DVD versions. How is the DVD better?”
Actually there are two versions on CDs, the standard edition and the multimedia edition. All three versions have the 73,000 articles but the standard CD has only 4,000 photos and illustrations, the multimedia CD has 8,500 and the DVD has 13,500 of those.
The DVD has features such as Spotlights, which have in-depth coverage using interactive animation, photographs, sound, and video. I wish we had that available on our drive home from Brazil via Patagonia. The DVD’s Compass would have been invaluable. As it was, we bought travel, history, and sociology books for each country before we entered it to have a better understanding of the peoples we met. Of course that was in 1971 and the computer necessary to access that kind of information would probably have been the size of our Dormobile. And DVDs? CDs? They were the stuff of science fiction. In more than one story, they were called “silvery discs.”
The 1999 Editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica are available now. The 2000 Editions will be available by the first quarter of 2000. Connection to the online service costs $5 per month, providing over 33,000 Internet Links. Also, you can get on www.britannica.com to access the paper edition, available only in text mode. Of course, the same argument applies as above. You can only access the online EB when you have connection. My wife and I each have a different ISP. At the moment, both are down.
The 1999 CD and DVD are $29.95 + $7 S&H each. The 2000 CD and DVD will be $69.95 + $7 S&H each. Order by calling 1-800-621-3900.
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