 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2000 Bryan Leech bryan@melbpc.org.au |
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Encarta has been around now for quite a few years. It is a program that Microsoft takes seriously, being released in nine language editions and having a team of over 200 editors &etc and over 1000 contributors working in eleven countries. This latest edition contains 3,500 new articles as well as many revisions and updates. It sports a revised interface and improved, natural language, search facilities.
In all, Encarta contains over 36,000 articles including extensive use of photos, graphics, charts, sound clips, animations and video clips. The World English edition released in Australia is thankfully free of Americanisms, instead having British/Australian spelling (except for the title!) and all narration and commentary uses mildly cultured English voices (naturally, with our small population, we cannot realistically expect an Australian edition of such a complex product).
The program is provided on six CD-ROMs, three devoted to the encyclopaedia, two to the Interactive World Atlas, and one to the World English dictionary. There are no printed instructions other than very cursory installation directions. During installation you are advised of the amount of hard disk space required, but you are not warned in advance. The space needed is 66-112 MB for the encyclopaedia, 68 MB for the atlas and an unspecified small space for the dictionary. The necessary computer specifications are not given, but I suspect that the program will run quite satisfactorily with any class of Pentium processor and 32 MB RAM - you may well be able to get away with less.
The Encyclopaedia
Encarta is designed to entice you into exploring knowledge. In trying to review the program, I found that I was constantly getting sidetracked into areas of information that cropped up and looked interesting. In general, you can approach the encyclopaedia in one of two ways: you can have a specific piece of information or a specific project you wish to explore and can concisely stick to your theme, or you can approach it from the view of just browsing for general knowledge.
For specific searches, you just enter a query in the FIND panel at the top left of the main screen (see Figure 1). The query can be simply key words, or it can be a natural language sentence. The panel below will list the articles that match your query and you can browse them for the information you seek, each selected article or media item being displayed in the main area to the right.
If you wish to research a project, Encarta provides a Research Organizer. This is based on an outliner, where you can nominate topic headings and sub-headings at several levels. These can then each be the subject of a FIND, and the information found, including graphics, copied and pasted into the outline. Topics and sub-topics can be re-sequenced at any stage. There is provision for citing references - good training for writing reports and theses, but also good for acknowledging Microsoft's copyright on the material.
Although the writer can expand on the material that has been pasted together within the outline, the total outline can be exported to any of the major word-processing programs for finishing off. The Research Organizer is a powerful tool for school projects, and might even serve for first-year University; the Encarta content is not sufficiently sophisticated to go beyond this level.
For general browsing, there are several approaches. Perhaps the principal one is the Filter Search, shown in Figure 2. Here, the user selects a principal topic area, say the Arts; a subcategory, say Dance; a place, say Melbourne; and a time period, say 20th century - all of which returns an informative article on the Australian Ballet which was founded and has its home in Melbourne. In another search, having a background as a Physical Chemistry lecturer at RMIT University, I found a chart for cation separation - something I would have expected to be too technical for such a source.
Other approaches to browsing are the Time line (Figure 3) where you can select an era and then hive off into specifics at any point. The Time line only starts at 16,000,000 BC, so misses out on the dinosaurs and the formation of the universe, solar system and planets (all of which, of course, can be found by other means in the encyclopaedia). There are also Topic Trails. Starting with eleven topic categories, each of which has a collection of topics that lead to the Topic Trails with anything from eight to twenty stops. At any point, you can leave the trail and go off on your own, to return to the trail later and, if you wish, follow it to its end.
Virtual Tours are also fascinating to explore. With a large range of topics, you go to the sights and sounds of different places in the world and throughout history. With the ability to scan 360 degree views, and to move to different locations shown in maps, these are a feast of visual information.
Unfortunately Encarta isn't always right. I found that it had corrected some errors about the history of writing that occurred in the 1995 edition (they now correctly identify ancient Sumeria as the birthplace of literature), but, Encarta incorrectly identified the Darling (2,736 km) as the longest river in Australia. A separate search on the Murray river revealed it to be Australia's "principal" river, and showed its length (3,720 km) to be longer than the Darling. The Atlas was the source to properly clear up the facts. It is the Murray-Darling which is 3,720 km long and the longest river system in Australia. The Murray itself is only 2,589 km. However, I suspect the errors are few, and there is a good compliment of Australian information.
The Atlas
The Atlas is claimed to be the most extensive work of its type, in any media format, ever published, containing 1.8 million place names. Starting with a globe of the world which can be grabbed by a hand icon and turned to any required region, you can zoom in on any required location. The degree of fine detail that can be achieved by zooming depends on which of the twenty map styles you have chosen. But if you are using say, the comprehensive view, you can start with a general view of Australia as shown in Figure 4 and zoom all the way in to a street map of the inner suburbs of Melbourne (Figure 5). Maps can be viewed by political boundaries, by precipitation or by climate, to name a few. A vast amount of statistics is available: for example, you can view maps by the incidence of Internet providers. Detailed articles on a wide range of topics are provided, like the Land and Climate article on Australia shown in Figure 6.
The Encarta Atlas is indeed an impressive piece of work, and should serve all your general Atlas needs. It is a valuable bonus to the encyclopaedia collection.
The Dictionary
There is not a lot to say about the dictionary. The number of words it contains is not specified, but it is extensive. The pronunciation of each word is sounded, and there are extensive articles on the backgrounds and contexts of words. As well as the dictionary, there is also a Thesaurus a book of Quotations, plus English-French, French-English, English-German and German-English dictionaries. With its multimedia design, the Encarta dictionary is also valuable resource.
In summary
I can recommend the Encarta Encyclopedia (sic) as an excellent general
reference with superb searching and browsing tools. Whilst, for example, Encyclopaedia Britannica Deluxe has
more content, some of which is pitched at a higher level, it has an inferior search engine, making
information harder to obtain, and is dearer. Encarta seems to me to be an ideal choice as a general
encyclopaedia for the whole family, with good information for children at all school levels up to year twelve
at least. It includes a curriculum guide tailored to Australia which is also a valuable learning tool.
Street price: around $140.
Reprinted from the April 2000 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
