CDCDNEP8.RVW 971106 "The 1998 Canadian and World Encyclopedia", McClelland & Stewart, 1997, 0-7710-1981-5, C$79.95 %A McClelland & Stewart %C 481 University Avenue, Toronto, ON M5G 2E9 %D 1997 %G 0-7710-1981-5 %I McClelland and Stewart Inc. %O C$79.95 +1-416-598-1114, fax: +1-416-598-4002, tlyon@mcclelland.com %T "The 1998 Canadian and World Encyclopedia on CD-ROM" Based primarily upon the material in "The Canadian Encyclopedia", this CD-ROM extends the full (and somewhat updated) content from the print edition with audio, video, and graphics, as well as the complete text of the Gage Canadian Dictionary, Maclean's Year in Review, The Columbia Encyclopedia, a French-English dictionary and Roget's Thesaurus. Together with the search engine and a relatively intuitive interface, the package is a very useful and educational tool. As a rabid Canadian nationalist, I am, of course, predisposed to like it, but the encyclopedia is also the best CD-ROM based reference I have reviewed, regardless of source or subject. The package will run under either Windows or Macintosh. System requirements are fairly steep, in terms of multimedia, but a great deal of the text information is still accessible without advanced graphical displays or sound cards. The package can be run strictly from the CD-ROM, or an installation can be done onto the user's hard disk. (Running the encyclopedia from CD-ROM only requires a prior installation of QuickTime for access to the multimedia clips.) I mentioned that the interface is "fairly" intuitive: one persistently irritating feature is that, having selected a media item from an encyclopedia article, clicking on the "Back" button doesn't take you back to the article, but rather to the "previous" (in some arbitrary order) media item. It takes a while to realize that you have to use the hanging tabs to return to the item you were researching. The item type icons are also sometimes confusing. A particular map of British Columbia is not, apparently, a map, it is, instead, a "Clickable" or a "VR." (It does, in fact, have clickable regions that present you with pictures or other maps. No, excuse me, other "clickables.") A clickable is represented on the list of contents by a hand with an extended index finger, but in encyclopedia articles by something like a target. (In a work this size there are also, of course, occasional mistakes. A clickable region in the Pacific Range of the Coast Mountains brings up a picture of Vancouver Island. The article on the De Havilland Dash 7 is illustrated by a picture of the Dash 8. However, these errors are remarkably absent, for the most part.) With CD-ROM based encyclopedias, search capabilities are very important. The encyclopedia section provides for four types of searching: by title, subject, boolean search and "smart search". The boolean search appears to do a full text search, rather than restricting the user to canned indices. Search engines on other CD- ROM encyclopedias often use indices, which can mean that a term not found in the index will result in either no results, or far too many. SmartSearch is rather interesting. It does not appear to require that all terms appear in the articles it finds, but does seem to rank order listings on the basis of frequency of the appearance of terms. There also seems to be some kind of thesaurus function which adds terms: a search for "Avro" and "Arrow" brought up articles with the term "CF": the designation for Canadian fighter aircraft (of which Avro built a number). SmartSearch isn't all that intelligent: you can type in full sentences, but the search will find (and rank) articles by such common words as "want." In responding to the draft of this review, the publisher pointed out the tuner feature in SmartSearch. This does allow the user to weight search terms, and on the first trial I made completely eliminated extraneous articles. (Information on this and other features is available in the help files or on the http://tceplus.com Web site, but you have to be fairly persistent to find it.) In any case, all searches are conducted very quickly. A trial of the dictionary was interesting. It listed Zamboni (although it didn't know of any synonyms), but presented the phonetic spelling by replacing the "o" with a one-half symbol and open double quotes, and the "i" with a paragraph mark. It didn't like "saltchuck", but did tell me to look up "salt chuck" instead. The definitions of these and other terms were fairly terse, but accurate. (It didn't list "hoser", or any variants, and an "Arrow" is either shot from a bow or indicates direction.) In addition to the standard search and access tools, the package includes a quiz function, and timeline features. It is also supported by monthly updates available over the Internet. An addition to this year's package is "Lives and Times of the Prime Ministers." This information is not integrated into the dictionary: it is a separate product on a separate disk. I find it difficult to find what to say about this second disk. The program does integrate text and media clips, but it is a banal and very distant second to the encyclopedia itself. (Some of the best parts of it are text clips lifted wholesale from the encyclopedia, albeit without the hypertext linking functions.) In comparison to the research, scholarship, and wealth of information in the main product, the Prime Ministers disk feels like a kind of low budget PBS documentary. (Is this an ironic artifact of Rogers funding of the ExCITE Foundation?) However, pedestrian as it may be, it in no way detracts from the quality of the encyclopedia. A treasure, for Canadians, and a very superior product even in comparison to the major, and much more highly funded, multimedia encyclopedias. I highly recommend it for anyone, regardless of nationality. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1997 CDCDNEP8.RVW 971106