Grolier: On CD-ROM and America Online

Grolier is now in its 9th CD-ROM edition, with the same high quality articles as ever, and with increased multimedia components and improved interface. A year ago I was not enchanted by the design of the main menu of the 1996 edition, and I am happy to say that it improved, too. No only have the designers applied better make-up, but offer four different versions if not in content, then in look and feel. My favorite is the standard one, but those who like the design of Wired magazine or metro graffiti will probably choose the Plugin or the StreetSmart interface version. The search software is powerful, allowing single and multiple character truncations, word proximity operation, restricting the search to specific parts of the articles such as the title or captions. In the advanced mode that Grolier calls Complex mode, you may limit the search by media type (text, picture, map, table, factbox, audio, video, etc.) and by 10 major categories (science, technology, geography, history). All of these make it very easy to zero in on the relevant articles. The help file is very well designed, structured, and illustrated and offers a QuickTour to check out the features of the encyclopedia and to illustrate how to navigate in it. There is one feature that I dislike in navigation. If an article has several pictures, such as the one about impressionism, it is cumbersome for the user to have to step back to the multimedia list to choose the next item to be displayed or played back. There should be a button beneath the picture that would allow moving to the next multimedia item, or even to create a slide show of those items. This would be worthwhile, as Grolier has not only many multimedia elements but most of them are of high quality. There are 10,000 pictures, 1,200 maps, 200 video and animation clips, and 15 hours of sound. The pictures are usually enlargable, though only once. Many of the paintings and photos would deserve a real close-up. The closing of the pictures should be made more obvious via a labelled button. The images can be saved only through the Windows clipboard, a rather archaic solution instead of the common Save As...option. The sound clips are either in WAV or MIDI format. The latter -- by definition -- is a synthesized sound that I don't have much interest in and I don't have much interest in, and I don't think that I am alone. Grolier should do us a favor and indicate with a distinct icon in the list of multimedia elements in which of the two formats a sound clip is. This would spare us the trouble of leaving the list just to find out that an interesting tune is in MIDI format. The videos are good, though today's technology is still not prime time for video. The number of Interactivities have been expanded and they are splendid. The one showing the White House can be rotated, then by the click of a button you can look at the different floors similar to the cross-sections in those beautiful Dorling Kindersley books and CD-ROMs. The animation effects in explaining the human and animal anatomies are first class. The Gallery lets you browse the multimedia collection in itself and also offers filters to limit the listings to images, maps, audio, video and animations and by categories within those (i.e. city maps, or famous speeches). The price (below $50) for this content, software, and multimedia experience is a steal. The only drawback of the CD-ROM version is that it cannot be kept as current as the online versions, though the hotlinks to CompuServe somewhat alleviate this problem--for a price. I think that Grolier should provide such hotlinks also to America Online, which as become more popular in the U.S. than CompuServe.

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