New Millenium Encyclopedia Deluxe Edition

Description:

New Millenium Encyclopedia

This interactive, multimedia encyclopedia and reference library includes around 25,000 articles, 13,000 photographs, 500 sounds, speeches, animations and videos. Books that come with the library are: Simon & Schuster New Millenium Encyclopedia and World Atlas; Merriam-Webster's Biographical Dictionary; Webster's College Dictionary, College Thesaurus, Quotationary and English Language Desk Reference; 1998 World Almanac and Book of Facts; and the NASA Chronicles.

This encyclopedia is not static! Articles and media are updated via the Internet, as information evolves. New books can be downloaded into the library from the VersaBookStore - it has free material as well as books for purchase. They can also be added from other online bookstores or from CD-ROM's and DVD-ROM's.

The Research Center is used to search for and view items, including downloaded books. View books that are on the Research Desk in the library. Click on any book to list its articles and media content. Media include photographs, videos, animations, music, sounds, and speeches. Search features allow for general and targeted searches through both text and media.

Use Binders to organize research on any topic of interest to you - store articles, media items, and URLs in them. Access, view, and print any items stored in a binder.

Simple search capabilities include search on item titles, full text search of bodies of articles and media captions, keyword search and search by topic. Queries can be expressed in plain English. Hypersearch lets you pick any word in an article, and find other material that includes this word - simply by double clicking on the word.

The Standard Library is a simple tool for managing books and bookshelves. The Graphical (Wizard's) Library provides an easy way of organizing available books or purchasing new ones. Download books from an Internet bookstore, create new bookshelves and drag the new books into them. The Wizard sits in the library, waiting to help you. Listen to his explanations, or sit back while he reads to you!

Features:

• Multimedia content
• Automatic update of articles and media
• Downloading of books from Internet bookstores, CD-ROM's and DVD-ROM's
• Binders to organize material
• Natural language queries
• Hypersearch
• Advanced Search options
• Librarian Wizard assists or reads to you
• Link to the New Millenium InfoCenter
• InfoPager downloads personalized newspaper
• Online Guided Tour
• Online User Manual

Technical Aspects:

A small manual is included in the jewel case, with a summary of features and how to access them, as well as a support phone number and e-mail address.

After installation, the encyclopedia automatically updated itself via the Internet. This took about 15 minutes via a cable modem, so could be very long at lower speeds! Occasionally there were delays, and it seemed that the encyclopedia was checking for books or updates on the net - this was indicated by a sentence at the bottom of the screen, that was easy to overlook. Book downloads also took some time.

I did comparative searches with 2 other standard electronic encyclopedias (1998 editions). I searched in all 3 encyclopedias for information on Tibet, Doric columns and snapping turtles. The amount of information found was comparable, but the New Millenium Encyclopedia had an edge in better search capabilities, in particular its general hypersearch - the other encyclopedias have static hyperlinks, that is you link only from predefined words in the text.

Access to the InfoPager electronic news service was described as part of the package. I installed this with no difficulty but was unable to download news material. Subsequently there was a long delay in startup of the encyclopedia, and the help e-mail contacts for both New Millenium and Infopager did not respond on this within a couple of days.

Country anthems were listed in the music section, but had no content - I was able to play a variety of classical music but not the anthems.

Report and Conclusions:

I browsed the VersaBookStore. It has a relatively small number of books to date, but I found quite a few free books to download, including the Gettysburg Address, Aesop's Fables, and all of the Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan series, as well as a wide variety of books on philosophy.

Browsing the different media in the core material was also fascinating. I listened to an audio recording of Churchill's World War 2 speech, and to dolphin echolocation, and looked at an animation of the Greenhouse effect. The NASA Chronicles yielded information on astronauts and I found an article on technology in public schools in the World Almanac. Overall, the material has a U.S. focus, as do other electronic encyclopedias.

This is an extremely useful reference source, and has been set up to facilitate research - by its extensibility, and the techniques provided for searching and organizing material. However, the self update feature and downloading of books might be problematic with slower modems.

A fantastic resource for students of all ages, and I loved the library Wizard!