Product Reviews

The Encyclopedia Britannica needs no introduction; spanning 32 volumes, and constantly updated with new entries written by some of the world's leading academics, it's a hugely significant repository of human knowledge. This DVD contains the whole lot, linked to extra content and updates online.

At under £40, they'd have had to get something badly wrong to make this look like a poor deal, and fortunately they haven't. Installation was painless, except for the Catch-22 of the installer asking us for a serial number that wasn't printed anywhere except on the disc we were installing from, and although a full install tak 4GB of hard disk space, you can reduce that to half the amount or less if you don't mind having to insert the DVD to see multimedia content.

Look and learn

Britannica is presented in a web browser-style window that's very neatly designed, with legible if not exactly beautiful text courtesy of Microsoft's Trebuchet font. Searching is fast, with different categories of result listed and thumbnailed down the left side, and there are extra tools such as the Brainstormer to help you explore the content

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when searching by keyword is too specific.

As well as the Encyclopedia itself, you get the Children's Library (or Elementary Library, as it's referred to onscreen), aimed at under-tens, and the Student Library, which caters for 10 to 15-year-olds with over 15,000 specially created articles. These have various features to round up and present information, such as nations and flags and historical timelines, and work well for kids.

The new Britannica Workspace lets you create any number of projects, then add a bookmark to a project for any content you're viewing, which makes it much easier to keep track of your research. You can add notes to a project, but this isn't quite flexible enough to be really useful.

Our only general gripe is that while most of the content has been superficially localised for the UK, for example by converting spellings, this doesn't extend very far; an article on Tony Blair, for example, describes the machinery of UK politics using US terminology that will sound awkward to Brits. The supplied dictionary and thesaurus are from Merriam-Webster, also American, and haven't been localised, so if you look up 'color' you get all the definitions of the word, while 'colour' just returns 'chiefly Brit var of color'. It can get slightly annoying trying to remember which spellings you need to use when searching each resource. The same concern applies to the children's content, which won't all be relevant and isn't linked to the National Curriculum - although maybe that should be counted a blessing.

Britannica is an unrivalled resource that's adapted very well to the digital age. It's excellent value for this quantity and quality of content, and you don't even need to find shelf space for it.