Review: Encyclopaedia Britannica

Product Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite, 2004 CD Edition
Company: Encyclopaedia Britannica
URL: http://www.britannica.com
Category: Educational software
Price: $70
Requirements: G3 350 MHz or faster PowerMac, OS X 10.2
Rating: 4 bounces - Pure Lust

For many people the Internet has become the first source of information they turn to when they need to find out about things not covered by their personal library of books. Though convenient and costing nothing more than your monthly cable connection bill, the Internet isn't the most reliable source of information. Very little of what is on the web is fact checked or edited in any meaningful way, so some discrimination is needed to separate off the good stuff from what is inaccurate, spurious, or deliberately misleading. This is especially true with children. Any schoolteacher will tell you that the Internet is the main source of information that their pupils use when writing papers and science projects, but children are even less discriminating that adults, with the result that all to often the simply copy and paste anything they find on the web straight into their reports.

Encyclopaedia Britannica have pitched their Ultimate Reference Suite as an all-in-one information source for children, students, and adults. Besides the Encyclopaedia Britannica itself, the Student and Elementary versions of the encyclopaedia are included as well, along with Collegiate and Student editions of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus. There are other goodies too, including a 90-day trial membership to Britannica Online and a year's worth of free updates.

Installation & System Requirements

The Ultimate Reference Suite comes on either six CD-ROMS or a single DVD, depending on the version you buy. In either case, installation is relatively simple; the only real choice you need to make is whether to install a minimal (320 MB) that leaves most of the files on the CD-ROM or DVD, or a full (3 GB) version of the program that doesn't require any of the disks to be inserted to use the program. A custom installation is possible as well, so that you can pick and choose what's installed, for example you might want to copy the text and image files to the computer but leave the multimedia ones on the CD-ROM or DVD. This would be useful if you need to save space, but in this age of multi-GB hard drives it makes so much more sense to put everything on the hard drive and not have to worry about inserting and swapping disks.

Once up and running, the user will notice that it eschews the traditional Macintosh interface more or less completely. The reason for this is that the Ultimate Reference Suite is a Java program, and consequently runs in its own little world separate from the other Mac OS X programs. The important keystrokes like Command-C for copying do work the same, so Mac users won't feel lost; but there are some important differences too. Drag and drop doesn't work, and the look and feel of the windows is very Microsoft Windows-like. Nonetheless, the program is stable and reasonably fast on my 1 GHz G4 PowerBook. Lags do occur when switching between modes (for example between "A-Z Browse" and "Year In Review") for example, but they are not common or long enough to become annoying. You will of course need Java installed on your Mac, which it should be by default in most cases. The Ultimate Reference Suite installer also adds QuickTime for Java to your system, but it would be a good idea to run System Update afterwards to make sure you have the latest versions of the OS X Java software installed anyway. Other than speed, the only other problem comes with screen redrawing; if you resize the main window sometimes the buttons and fields fail to be positioned correctly. Flipping to another application and then returning to the Ultimate Reference Suite seems to fix this though. Once in a while previews of images and articles don't work properly either, but when actually opened these articles are fine.

Searching for Information

Probably the logical place to start reviewing something like the Encyclopaedia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite is the interface. How easy is it to find what you're looking for? After all, there are tens of thousands of articles spanning the different parts of the reference suite. There are several ways to find information, but two that recommend themselves are the regular search box and the Knowledge Navigator. The search box is a lot like an Internet search engine: you type in key words, and maybe use Boolean commands to narrow down the results. If you prefer, advanced search buttons are available to activate similar sorts of restrictions; these are essential for searching for phrases, where just using quotation marks around a phrase won't work.

The Knowledge Navigator is something different. Long-time Apple watchers might remember something of the same name advocated by then-Apple CEO John Sculley: a computerized tool for linking together text, images, sounds, and movies in a free-flowing way such that research could be carried out intuitively by entering search criteria and following links from one article to the next. While the Internet very largely fulfilled this vision, the Ultimate Reference Suite has its own version that offers one way of helping you through your search for information. The idea behind it is that sometimes we don't know the precise terms or subjects for the issue we're researching; for example we might be working on a paper about Ancient Chinese culture but not yet know any of the kings, battles, or artistic styles.

The Knowledge Navigator is a graphical tool that leads the user to specific articles by offering an array of related but contrasting fields. Click on one, and it leads to a new array, and so on until you find a topic that interests you.

Thinking about Ancient China, then, your search might go like this: Of the opening fields, "Human Society" is the most logical first step, then "History", and finally "Archaeology". Things become a little odd now, but one possible option ("An-Yang", a city in China) makes some sense compared to the others (which are as diverse as "Dendrochronology' and "Jean-Francois Champollion). That leads to "China" itself; then "Five Dynasties"; "Chinese Art" and so on to many possible and relevant topics. The trick is to know when to get off this series of links and actually read an article. At other times, the Knowledge Navigator is not the best tool to use. I decided to look up Mary, Queen of Scots using this tool and failed miserably ending up going around and around in circle between History" and "Human Society". But of course if you have very specific ideas about what you want to know about, such as a person or country, or maybe issues to do with a historical event or scientific principle, then the regular search engine would be much more useful and direct.

Articles

Like most academics, the first thing I do when I open an encyclopedia is to check out the entry on my specialist subject. I typed in "Ammonites" and at the top of my list of related articles was one about a tribe of people in Ancient Israel. Skipping down the list I found articles which mentioned ammonites, the fossils, incidentally, and from those came to the actual subject heading I should have used, "ammonoids". The article was reasonably detailed but not brilliant, enough for high school students but inadequate for the needs of someone in a geology 101 class.

Article entries are generally good and include links to related topics as well as images, tables and multimedia files. But it is important to use the right search term, as in this case the only article about "ammonites" was one on an ancient tribe of people rather than everyone's favourite spiral fossil.

Reading around other articles I knew something about, I found that the articles were generally good, sometimes exceptional. There is variability, and the depth and detail of many articles does not seem to match the printed version I have here in my apartment, but overall the encyclopedia does offer a solid, reliable source of information of general readers and students. Just don't expect a substitute for a specialist textbook though; so while a history or biology student at college would find it useful as a primer, there just isn't the depth for more than a 101 class in most subjects. Are there actual errors though? A few I came across included typographies (e.g., "branchiopod" for "brachiopod" in the entry about the Brachiopoda) and outdated facts (e.g., that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland "lack political institutions"). The reliance on Imperial rather than metric units in some articles, for example the atlas uses square miles for geographical area, is obsolete outside of the United States and confusing to anyone brought up using the metric system. More serious are misleading terms that schoolteachers and college professors work very hard to get people not to use, such as "cold blooded" for ectothermic and "dark reaction" for the light-independent reaction of photosynthesis. The reason these sorts of terms are avoided is that they put across the wrong ideas about things; in its normal, warm habitat a lizard's blood isn't noticeably more cold than that of a mammal, and plant cells don't need darkness to carry out the light-independent stage of photosynthesis.

Nice touches to the article entries include the automatic linking of words to the dictionary and previews of images when the cursor is held over them. Another winning feature is the catalogue of 'classic' articles from previous editions, such as one by T E Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") about guerilla warfare, of which he was a practitioner. It finishes off with this, about why guerillas eventually win, provided certain factors apply:

"In 50 words: Granted mobility, security (in the form of denying targets to the enemy), time, and doctrine (the idea to convert every subject to friendliness), victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end decisive, and against them perfections of means and spirit struggle quite in vain."

As American, British, and increasingly other nations' troops, are injured and killed occupying Iraq with no obvious exit strategy or palpable benefit to world security, reading something as trenchant and authoritative as this reminds as how important it is to try and learn from our history. Not all of these articles are easy to read, but any one of these classic articles would be a great starting point for a student working on a term paper looking for something inspirational and powerful, and far better than the usual pre-masticated writing in the average textbook or the banal stuff they find on the Web.

Dictionary & Atlas

The Merriam-Webster Collegiate and Student dictionaries are included, and both of these are valuable resources. Although the Merriam-Webster dictionary is widely used in the United States, it is largely unknown in the rest of the English-speaking world, where the Oxford English Dictionary is preferred. This isn't to say that one is better than the other, both are excellent, but there are important differences. Spelling differences between British and American English are of course well known, and hardly worth going into here, although I was dismayed to see the word "colour" dismissed as a "chiefly British variant of color". I would imagine many Australians, South Africans, Irish, New Zealanders would find it rather a surprise to learn they were speaking British English! No, the main issue for those unfamiliar with Merriam-Webster will be the pronunciation guide, which is completely unlike the Oxford English Dictionary system. Though explained adequately enough, users outside the United States will probably prefer to use another resource for pronunciations employing whatever system they are more familiar. A lovely aspect of the dictionary is the tight interface.

Clicking on a word in the Ultimate Reference Suite will take you to the dictionary entry, an indispensable tool for anyone, but especially students and writers. The dictionary uses US-English, though, which means that there are occasional small differences in meaning, spelling, and usage.

The atlas is a bit hit-and-miss. On the one hand it is easy to use with drop down menus for countries and regions, intelligent links to related articles, multimedia files and so on. But it is very US-centric. While the map of the US is can be clicked to zoom into the States, cities and other notable features, the map of UK is rather more limited and downright quirky. For example, there is clickable link on the British map for Monmouthshire (a Welsh county with a surface area 329 square miles and a population of 86,000); but not one for the county of Devon, one of the largest in England, with seven times the surface area and almost ten times the population! The map images themselves are nice and colourful, but like all the images in the Ultimate Reference Suite are relatively small, low-resolution bitmaps, so of limited use as a source of maps for publications, essays, and reports.

One of the most impressive tools in the suite is the interactive atlas, though it is notably strongest in its coverage of the United States.

Conclusion

As a child of the 1970s, I grew up with two sets of encyclopaedias. The twenty-three volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica occupied an entire shelf over an Akai reel-to-reel tape recorder in one room, while the marginally smaller Children's Encyclopaedia filled a whole level of a bookcase in another room. Does the Ultimate Reference Suite CD version of these books provide a comparable resource to families today? Emphatically, the answer is yes. That is not to say that the one replaces the other, though. The CD version lacks the depth of the book version, but it's a good deal smaller and cheaper (the regular price of the thirty-two volume printed version is $1395). It's easy to browse and search, and though demanding in terms of processor power and hard disk space, should run well on any modern Macintosh.

The Ultimate Reference Suite does have its flaws, though: the atlas and dictionary are parochial, the images are of relatively low quality, and errors can be found here and there. But the price tag is modest considering that even a run of the mill computer game will cost $50 and have a tiny fraction of the longevity of the Ultimate Reference Suite, so its value cannot be argued with. I like the fact the whole thing can be installed and run without needing the CD to be in the machine or a network connection maintained (the Ultimate Reference Suite is a great time-waster to have on a laptop when you're snowbound at JFK). In short, simply one of the best family gifts this Christmas.

- Neale Monks

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