Grolier has been in the encyclopedia business for a long time--it knows all about information and how to organize it. However, nowadays, with the explosive growth of interactivity and the benefits offered by multimedia, an encyclopedia has to be not only informative, but also highly interactive and absorbing. By any criteria, Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia fills the bill.

Boasting the largest overall number of text entries, maps, pictures, video and audio clips, animations, and interactivities, Grolier is a clear leader among its CD-ROM competitors. In addition, Grolier has added an on-line component that keeps the encyclopedia fresh and up to date.

Grolier interface is clean and easy to use. Selecting topics, time lines, atlases or maps, guided tours, and interactivities are very well organized. Since it can be easy to forget where you've been, a history button lists every entry you've clicked on during your current session with the disk.

A section called Interactivities takes the reader in immersive, multimedia activities covering seven categories: Animal anatomy, Aviation, Famous Buildings/Landmarks, Habitats, Human Body, Solar System, and Space Exploration.

Each category offeres organized information and a wide variety of multimedia, which makes the information lively and relevant. Animations, 3D-rotatable renderings, video and audio, and a variety of views of objects, including cutaways and labels.

The search engine, the key to finding information, is probably the most important feature of any encycloeida, which you use every time you load the disk. The Grolier search engine is extremely quick. For example, I typed in the word "space," and in a matter of seconds some 1,024 references appeared. From this list, I clicked on Spacelab and the field was narrowed to 54 entries. As you refine your search, each entry shows the keywords highlighted and hypertext links that take you deeper and deeper into a topic.

You may elect to make a more complex search using Boolean terms for further refining. AL long list of checkoff boxes will refine the search even further to include media types, such as video clips, photos, text only, or guided tours and so on.

Since any encyclopedia is a work in progress, Grolier has added an on-line component. When reading a topic of interest, at a click of a button you are taken out to the Internet to Grolier On-line and presented more links on the topic. For example, I was reading about space medicine and and was taken from my CD-ROM, out to the internet to NASA's Space Biomedical Research Institute's web site, which was packed with more info allowing a better understanding of a fascinating topic.

Grolier editors are promising to add some 1,000 new, related on-line website links a month. These selected sites will be "child-safe" sites. The sites are accessible via a link to CompuServe, or via your own internet service provider. In addition, at a click of the mouse, Grolier will update links to the Internet Index on your hard drive.

Other features worth noting in the '97 edition are: interactive time lines, tons of maps and atlases, and guided tours. The guided tours are broken into 16 categories and list selected pictures and text articles, all of which have additional links on the subject. When you have all of the information available at your fingertips, it may be bookmarked, saved/printed for later use.

A unique feature -- Grolier offers you a choice of four different interface screens. Different color schemes where designed to appeal to different age groups. A small detail, certainly, but it shows that Grolier is taking time to make the user's experience with the encyclopedia comfortable and easy to use.

In summary, the '97 edition of Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia is worthy of its name. It make very good use of the technology that informs, but, more importantly, fires the imagination. The more you dig for information, the more you realize how much you didn't know, and the more you want to learn. It's no longer a chore to learn but actually fun.

Through multimedia, subjects come alive, making it easier to grasp and more fully comprehend the research topic. Linking via the Internet to sites having more detailed information adds tremendous value to the experience and gives the reader the latest, real-world information direct from the source, rounding out the learning experience.

This is one encyclopedia that you will use over and over; it won't gather dust on the shelf. Because of its on-line component it won't be out of date the minute you buy it. The entire family will enjoy using and exploring the whole world of information on this CD and in cyberspace.

© 1996 Ira Dick. Posted with permission of Hartford User Group Exchange, Inc. (HUGE).