The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group
Encyclopaedia Britannica 2002
Bernadette Houghton

Often, certain sights or sounds or smells bring back memories and evoke a wave of nostalgia. For some people it's things such as mint sauce, Bing Crosby's White Christmas or a whiff of shoe polish. For me it's Encyclopaedia Britannica. As a pimply 13-year old I was presented with a set of lithographs as a prize in an Encyclopaedia Britannica competition, and now every time I come across Britannica, I'm once more thirteen years old and being congratulated by a dapper salesman in a suit and tie. And now that I've declared a possible bias in this review, let's have a look at Encyclopaedia Britannica 2002.

Britannica 2002 comes in several editions. The full text of the 32 volumes plus yearbooks up to 2001, an atlas and dictionary are included in all editions. Additional features, such as Timelines, Visual Tours and extra snazzy multimedia are included in the Deluxe and Expanded editions. This review covers the Deluxe Edition.
 
It's always nice to quote some beefy statistics, so before we investigate Britannica's merit, here's a few: there are 85,000 articles, 56 million words, 613,000 indexed references, 300,000 Web links and 4,100 Timeline entries. A lot of information packed onto two CD-ROMs.

Installation

Actually, Britannica comes on 3 CD-ROMs, an installation disc and the two data discs. Installation follows standard Windows procedures and you're offered a choice of three installation options. I found this a tricky decision since one very vital piece of information is omitted - how much disk space each option requires. I choose the Typical installation option, which also happens to be the "minimum installation", and which installs only the program files and Visual Tours.
 
I strongly recommend that if you have plenty of free disk space, you install Britannica using either the One Disc or Complete options, particularly if you expect to use it fairly frequently. My choice of the Typical option turned out to be a frustrating one. Ahem! If I may liken Britannica's behaviour to that of a normal, indecisive toddler - it simply couldn't make up its mind! Sometimes it requested that I insert either Disc 1 or Disc 2, and then decided it needed Disc 1 after all. A few seconds later it would want Disc 2 back again. A little trying, to say the least!

Entry Points

Britannica's opening screen is fairly clean and uncluttered and offers several entry points into the encyclopaedia:

  • Search
  • Britannica A to Z, an alphabetical index
  • Knowledge Navigator, which groups related subjects and offers progressively more specific subject choices the deeper you navigate
  • Atlas, not a full-bodied atlas as you might expect, but basically a means of accessing the encyclopaedia via maps
  • Timelines, which present world events in various subject categories, such as architecture, music and sports
  • Visual Tours, which offer multimedia excursions into selected topics, such as African wildlife, human anatomy and the history of rock music.
  • Dictionary, specifically, the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed.


Figure 1. Britannica 2002's opening screen.


Figure 2. Within Britannica's pages.

Search and Navigation
The search engine accepts natural language phrases; such as why is the sky blue. The search algorithm is fairly simple and is based principally on the number of times any of the search words occur in an article, excluding common words such as "why", "is" and "the". Typically, such algorithms yield a large number of hits with low relevance. To cater for this, the search screen also includes a Restrict Search button which weeds out results that don't contain ALL search words (ie. the search becomes the Boolean "sky AND blue" instead of "sky OR blue"). You can also restrict results to specific media (e.g. images, maps, videos) by simply selecting a media type.

There are a couple of things to be aware of with Britannica's search engine - searches are case-sensitive, and spelling may be either British or American, depending on the origins of an article.
 
Once you're in the encyclopaedia itself, by whichever entry point, Britannica offers links to related information on various tabs on the left of the screen. Articles themselves are also extensively hot linked, so it's very easy to become engrossed in following idle by-ways and find yourself far from your starting point. You can retrace your path step by step via Back and Forward buttons or by a Search history drop-down list. Britannica's Search window is also separate from the encyclopaedia window; a simple feature which I really appreciated.


Figure 3. Performing a natural language search.

Web Links

To get optimal use of Britannica, you really need an active Internet connection. Apart from the ability to download new and updated articles regularly, you can access additional articles and links to relevant Web sites. These Web's Best sites are vetted and chosen by Britannica editors, and are automatically included in searches whenever your Internet connection is active. Oddly, all my Britannica Web searches retrieved only seven results, regardless of topic.
 
If you're using Britannica's Web features, you might find yourself running out of system resources pretty quickly. Most links open new windows, so I found myself continually having to close them, and coping with the mutinous behaviour my PC displays whenever system resources are low.

Visual Tours

One thing I found partly disappointing was the Visual Tours. These don't always link to the main encyclopaedia and while the documentation's claim of 44 tours is strictly true, only four are full-bodied multimedia and accessible from the CDs. You can access another 18 with an Internet connection, but the remainder are basically topic spotlights consisting of overview text and still graphics. The tours that do contain multimedia, however, are very effective and contain a varied range of special effects.


Figure 4. Britannica's Timelines.


Figure 5. Thunderstorm's Visual Tour.

Research Organizer

Whenever you're doing any kind of research, it's handy to have some means of organizing your notes, and Britannica offers the Research Organizer for this purpose. It's a pretty straightforward mini- application, a storehouse for bookmarks, notes and graphics you collect, from the encyclopaedia, or from elsewhere. 

Assessment

To assess Britannica's effectiveness as a research tool, I posed a few questions and determined whether Britannica could provide the answer from within the first page of results; or if not from the first page of results, from its Web's Best links. The results are displayed in Figure 6. Judging from these results, Britannica's strength lies in its coverage of historical information and man's body of knowledge.
 
It doesn't rate as well on topical or Australian subjects; largely to be expected since the same is pretty much true of most encyclopaedias. Nevertheless, I still found some of the results and their ranking fairly odd. For instance, a Web's Best search for Australia's prime minister ranked sites relating to Malaysia, Pakistan and France as more relevant than Australia, another weakness of Britannica's simple search algorithm. Some of the Web's Best results included sites which had moved; an inherent problem with any Web links.

Britannica's real strength lies in its breadth and depth of information. And despite some snazzy, jazzy multimedia, Britannica remains at its core a scholarly encyclopaedia, with a large proportion of articles of an analytical nature.
 
Its multiple access points facilitate different approaches to the information within, so it suits a range of searching styles. And with different editions at different prices, it suits a range of budgets and hardware set-ups.

Cost and Availability

Available from local resellers, including Harvey Norman, Myer, Grace Bros, David Jones, Dick Smith Electronics, Office-works. Standard Edition (Win/Mac) $99, Deluxe Edition (Win) $199.00, Expanded Edition (DVD, Windows or Macintosh), $199.00.

Minimum System Requirements

Pentium 166 MHz (233 MHz recommended), 64 MB RAM (96 MB recommended for Windows 2000/Me/XP), 140 MB free hard disk space (plus 50 MB for IE 5.01), 800 x 600 resolution, 16-bit colour, CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive, mouse. Printer and Internet access recommended. Also available for Macintosh.

Figure 6. Questions posed to Britannica 2002.

Question           		       Britannica     Web's Best 
                    			answered?    answered?
Who is Australia's current 
    prime minister?      		   Yes    
Who is the Leader of the Opposition?       No        No
Who is the Victorian premier?        	   No        No
Who invented the printing press?   	   Yes    
When did the Challenger space 
    shuttle crash?           		   No        Yes
Who was St. Patrick and when do we 
    celebrate his day?      		   Yes    
When and where was the ENIAC built? 	   Yes    
What was the original purpose of 
    the Internet?          		   Yes    
When was John Dowland (lutist) born?  	   Yes    
Where was Daniel Mannix born?      	   Yes    
Who invented the Coolgardie safe?    	   No        No
Are emus birds or animals?      	   Yes    
Who is the "father" of the 
    detective novel?        		   Yes    
What was Charles Dickens' 
    unfinished work?     		   Yes    
Which English novelist was interned 
    in France in World War II?  	   No        No
Why is the sky blue?            	   Yes    
When will the comet Hale-Bopp be 
    visible from earth again?   	   No       Yes
Who will host the 2004 Olympic Games?      No       Yes
How did the War on Terror begin?     	   No        No

Reprinted from the March 2002 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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