Encyclopaedia Britannica 2005 DVD review

Would you prefer to zip through your work and then do something more fun, or spend all day rearranging windows as you hunt for information? If it's the latter, then read on.

The 2005 edition of Britannica's 'Ultimate Reference Suite', doesn't seem to have overcome its existing limitations - namely the clunky nature of its interface and its poor-quality live media. In an age when we can easily look up whatever we want on the Internet, and free alternatives such as the Wikipedia are now so good, it's time Britannica faced the fact it can no longer rely on the reputation it built up through 250 years of print publishing.

This single DVD includes three libraries: the standard 100,288-article Britannica, and tailored collections for students (15,716 articles) and elementary school kids (no article count, but designed to 'instill [sic] a look-it-up habit'). On the whole, the written content is hard, if not impossible to fault. It's just a shame it's often American-oriented. Apple Computer, for example, is said to have been the 'popularizer' of the graphical user interface, while a search for London helpfully informs you that it is the 'seat of Middlesex county, southeastern Ontario, Canada'. London England comes further down the list.

We chose to run it from the DVD, installing the front-end software on our eMac and leaving all the data on the disc, but this made for a slow and frustrating experience, and we often found ourselves clicking links twice before they would open. When they did, it was in a series of pokey windows. For some bizarre reason, Britannica has split each article into several small chunks (76 of them in the case of the Scotland entry, with such minutiae as 'land: drainage' split off from 'land: soils' and 'land: relief'), each of which must be opened individually. This leaves your screen cluttered, and you'll spend a lot of time moving things around to read the whole piece. Opening a video requires that you have two further windows on your desktop; one containing a button to launch the second, regardless of the fact you've already selected it from the sidebar.

Much of this live media looks like it has been ported from the original release. It often consists of little more than a few panning shots and an uninformative commentary that trails off without making much of a point.

The timeline feature, which also appears in its own window, is similarly weak. Resizing the window merely stretches and distorts the content rather than upping the number of items it can show at one time from a feeble three. Neither does it let you run several timelines side by side, so you can't cross-reference the women and sports timelines, for example, or compare technology with world events. Putting this to one side, it could do with a bit of an update here and there. The 1999 entry on the technology line confidently states that 'a study estimates that online Internet sales will reach $12 billion for the year'. So, was the study proved right or not?

The search feature is functional but unintelligent: it won't correct 'apppendix', for example, or find anything at all if you ask it about the humble, misspelt 'bananana'. It will discretely warn you of your mistake by turning your search term red, but when sites such as Google can take a guess at what your poorly spelt words mean, we don't see why an encyclopaedia shouldn't be able to do the same.

The atlas would benefit from a minor rethink. It opens to an overview map of the world, which doesn't fit on the screen in its default layout, even when we maxed out our eMac's resolution to 1280 x 960. Worse still, there's no map of Greenland, and that country doesn't even have an entry in the drop-down list of world nations, either. To get there you have to first click on North America to open an overview of that part of the globe, and then click Greenland, at which point you're transported to an article rather than a map.