Product ReviewsEducation/Reference
We rarely have the opportunity to look at an encyclopaedia that's entirely British in content. The latest offering from The Learning Company, the Oxford Interactive Encyclopaedia comprises five titles, all published in printed form by Oxford: the nine volume Oxford Illustrated Encyclopaedia, the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the Concise Oxford Thesaurus, the Oxford Dictionary of the World and the Pocket Oxford Dictionary of Biography. The main screen of the encyclopaedia offers three windows in which to view its contents. The largest of these provides article text and one of the two smaller windows displays media elements, such as a search tool, but can also be used to perform functions like locating cities on a world map or accessing the supplied planetarium. Each of the windows can be expanded to full-screen at any time, and each operates independently; so, for example, you can put bookmarks in any one and switch about between images and texts freely. Search facilities operate on several levels. You can search a complete textual index including descriptions of the media elements, for particular words or combinations of words, and build advanced searches incorporating Boolean and proximity operators. It's possible to restrict both the media searched and the number of items retrieved. Help on constructing complex searches is at hand in a constantly available window. There are other ways to access the main storehouse of information on the disc. The Topic Tree is a classical branching tree of knowledge, whose initially broad topics can be narrowed to particular articles. A more free-form approach is provided by the InfoLinks, which point you towards related subjects using a slick graphical interface. Several extra features complement the main body of the encyclopaedia. A Media Studio allows you to use the various
Finally, there's the obligatory timeline that offers several topic-based sub-divisions - arts, sciences, world history and the British Isles - and a selection of time intervals from single years through to a thousand-million years. Of all the features on the disc this one works particularly well, showing visually where media clips are available and offering a single click link to articles and media. As with every other modern multimedia encyclopaedia, the Oxford provides on-line links. Links to Internet resources are listed with other media at the end of articles. You simply click on a listed link to launch your Web browser and go directly to the Web site. However, this is as far as the Internet connectivity goes. Unlike most of its competition, the Oxford doesn't offer updates to its information store for regular download. In the medium to long term, this omission will mean this disc goes out of date more quickly than its rivals. The articles in this encyclopaedia are generally well written, but they're rather short and don't compare well in terms of depth of coverage to those of the World Book Encyclopaedia, (reviewed p197). Unlike World Book, there's an option to run the Oxford directly from the disc, which is somewhat painful on machines with older and slower CD-ROM drives but which is useful for occasional users or those desperately short of hard-disk space. The structure, presentation and search engine of the Oxford have been ported wholesale from Compton's Interactive Encyclopaedia (reviewed issue 32, p201). Little attempt has been made to disguise this fact beyond some redesigned icons and a new colour scheme: the printed manuals, for example, are identical for 70 to 80 per cent of their content. Both products are published by the Learning Company, which explains the re-use of the interface, but there's no avoiding the fact that, overall, this is a run of the mill product. While the timeline and search facilities are impressive, the atlas and planetarium are both disappointing. The movies and animations are over in a flash, the articles are too short and the interface feels clunky compared with the IBM's World Book. By Sandra Vogel |
|||||||||||||||||
