Encyclopedia Britannica 2004 DVD

This Ultimate Reference Suite is impressive, but can it beat Encarta?

After last year's review we hoped things might have improved in the 2004 release of 'today's best-selling encyclopedia'. Sadly, they haven't. The Encyclopedia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite 2004 DVD retains a quirky, unintuitive interface that sees the various parts of an article - text, tables, pictures and so forth - opening in separate windows that overlay each other and stay open when you move on to something else. It is easy to unintentionally have a dozen or more windows open at once.

The opening screen presents you with an empty results list, which is fair enough as you've not done a search, and there is an icon-menu, but some content would still be helpful. The first icon, Articles, might as well not be there, as it just pops up an instruction to use the main toolbar instead. The atlas, though, is among the worst in any reference product we have recently reviewed. It doesn't fit onto a 1,024 x 768 screen properly; there's too little room with the sidebar; too much without. It's flat, it's simplistic, and some of the countries, Greenland for example, don't have their own dedicated maps.

That said, this isn't a mere encyclopedia. It's an 'ultimate reference suite' comprising 101,000 articles, 22,000 multimedia items and images, and 2,775 maps. Encarta has 130,000 articles, 27,360 multimedia items and images and over 1.8 million locations on its interactive, 3D atlas. In light of this we find it ironic that the Britannia dictionary still throws up 'the best or most extreme of its kind' as one of the definitions of 'ultimate'.

The Encarta timeline is a colourful, attractive means of navigating the disc, overlaying several strands of world events so that you can see which happened simultaneously. The Britannica equivalent is a bland string of scrollable, clickable boxes that might have impressed us when CD-Rom drives were first released. What these timelines show is that an encyclopedia hangs, literally, off the back of its interface, and if the front end is ugly or hard to use then it's going to make finding the facts you need not only a chore, but also a bore.

What Britannica does have that Encarta can't match is an impressive heritage. Which other encyclopedia could boast articles by such notables as TE Lawrence (guerilla warfare), Sigmund Freud (psychoanalysis), Houdini (conjuring), Albert Einstein (space-time) and George Bernard Shaw (socialism)? These are impressive additions that will no doubt repay a second or third reading - particularly true of Einstein's tract, which on first reading is fairly impenetrable.

There are less impressive additions. The special report on 11 September seems misplaced in an encyclopedia, embedding the pertinent facts in a discussion on what it means to live in a 'global village', and using sentimental language that would perhaps work better in the US than here: 'For 56 years after World War II, Americans had policed the globe as beneficent gendarmes, trying to keep the world safe for democracy and capitalism.'

That aside, we can't fault the written content. Coverage is extensive and, so far as we can tell, accurate. It may be a little dry in places but it has an air of authority. Sadly, that is about the best we can say. It has many useful features, and dedicated sections for students and teachers (although we found the Research Organiser unnecessarily cumbersome and would quickly revert to pasting into a Word document), but almost all are done better by Microsoft.

We cannot help but draw the same conclusion as we did last year: Britannica is an impressive piece of work let down by poor implementation. It is behind the times in terms of interface design and the move from paper to screen has been an unhappy upheaval. For this reason, we still recommend upstart Encarta over this veteran, one-time benchmark, but hold out hope, once again, that next year things may improve.

Contact: Britannica 0845 075 7000
www.britannica.co.uk

System requirements:

• Windows 98SE and above
• 350MHz processor
• 256MB Ram
• 275MB free hard disk space (more for full install), DVD-Rom drive
• 800 x 600 display