Britannica DVD Review (Britannica CD Deluxe 2000)

Member Name: ric10561

Product:	Britannica CD Deluxe 2000
Date:	16/07/00 (25 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Loads of articles, DVD support, novel features.

Disadvantages: Constraining at times. Need to pay extra money for website updates.

Britannica on DVD destroys the need to go online for research. Ever. It's not just removing disk-swapping; it actually adds a lot more content and movies to Britannica so you can find information on just about anything. And if you can't, there are literally thousands of web links.

I would say about 3/4 of the articles in Britannica, and all of the main ones, contain web links. They are listed out and can be brought up with just one click. EB (Encyclopedia Britannica) offers In-Depth articles as well, which have outline views and many subsections.

Not to mention the massive media content. Movies, images and sounds cover most articles - looking up 'birds', for example, gives you an article with around 20 images.

There are lots of sections to Britannica over than basic articles. Firstly, it can be instantly updated via the web. The handy search field not only searches well throughout the 7500+ documents, but also delivers a report of your search, allows you to preview articles first, and if it can't find results will allow you to select a close match (for example, if you mispelled a word).

The other modes are a joy to use also. In Analyist, you can compare a country to another, or a country to other countries in its region. For example, select the UK and compare it agaisnt Europe. This is great for school homework. Not only can you make graphs or charts on pretty much anything (GDP, Life expectancy, birth rate, transport) but you can produce tables comparing ALL the data or, best of all, a report. Britannica automatically generates a word-processed report which appears to be written by you. Heh. It actually compared countries and their progress over the years, as well as the more serious differences. And it is all formatted well.

Spotlight mode offers spotlight topics on places such as dinosaurs, although there aren't many of these. Timeline is also quite constrained. You can select from about 60000 B
C to 2000 AD, but only in two areas (such as Economy and Health). This doesn't allow a broad enough picture.

Overall though, Britannica is excellent. All of the articles are organised under 'Branches of Knowledge' which mean you can navigate a tree structure towards them. There are tons of articles and extra novel features thrown in. This actually betters the more widely-known Encarta in terms of ease of use and content.

Summary: