If an argument were needed for liberating information from the paper used to carry it in the past, this is it. The two-CD set (with a third disk for software installation) contains over 44 million words, in 72,000 articles. A pocketful of plastic can take the place of a hefty bookshelf's worth of print and at the same time be easier to use and much cheaper to buy.
This is promoted as the "Multimedia Edition" and there is better use of images, video and graphics than in the earlier electronic Britannica. The multimedia elements are limited, however, and those who want the maximum graphic bells and whistles would be better off with Microsoft's Encarta. Where Bri- tannica excels is the range, authority and sheer volume of its information, and in this it is well out in front of its rivals.
Sitting down to explore the encyclopaedia is dangerous to productivity, as an intended halfhour browse can easily turn into two hours of subject-surfing. One minute it's the tribulations of St Sebastian and the next it's "the hurley, or caman, resembling a hockey stick except that the head is shorter and wider, is made of young pliable ash, 3.5 feet long and three inches wide in the oval-shaped striking blade".
As well as an excellent full-text search engine and the option to browse article headers, Britan- nica has a timeline in which concurrent developments in different subject areas can be compared, a map-based interface called Compass and some special multimedia sections called Spotlights. Another "Analyst" section allows country-by-country or country-against-region comparisons of a range of statistics. (Ireland had 44.1 mobile phones per 1,000 population, compared with 129 in Hong Kong, but we had more televisions per capita.)
The much-improved interface is based on a customised Internet Explorer and there are 15,000 links out of Britannica to relevant Internet sites. These work excellently with a leased-line connection to the Net, but waiting for a dial-up connection each time a Web-link is clicked is more tedious. Three months' access to Britannica Online are included.
In such an impressive sea of information it is almost refreshing to find an error. The 19thcentury novelist Charles Maturin is described as an "Irish Roman Catholic clergyman". In fact, he was a Church of Ireland clergyman, with such a low opinion of Catholicism that he published a book on what he saw as its shortcomings. This remains, nonetheless, the most impressive electronic reference work available.