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Microsoft Encarta Reference Suite 2000

Learning Comes to Life With Rich Multimedia

by Dale Farris, President, Golden Triangle PC Club

With the original release of Encarta many years ago, Microsoft became primarily responsible for the reinvention of the concept of the encyclopedia. Once only thought of as multiple volumes of hard bound books in a set, Encarta proved searching for encyclopedia reference material via CD ROM on a computer could be fun as well as informative. With Microsoft's corresponding release of the separate Bookshelf reference program, the idea of producing reference information has been fundamentally changed. 

Following the success of Encarta and Bookshelf, most all the other well known encyclopedia vendors, such as World Book and Compton's, began to transform the selling of their encyclopedias with their own efforts to produce a CD ROM version of their set. Now, even the formerly stodgy old mainstay in the encyclopedia genre, Encyclopedia Britannica, is available in a multimedia CD ROM version.

This transformation of encyclopedia reference material is an excellent example of the powerful potential inherent in the integration of computers with learning, and how this type of substantive information can be made to excite, intrigue and challenge. With these many years of success with electronic encyclopedias on CD ROM, now most reference publishers seriously consider the CD ROM medium, and soon DVD ROM, as the primary means of transmitting their material to their customers.

With the present "limited" space of approximately 600 MB on a CD ROM, the advent of DVD ROM discs, with anywhere from 4 to 15 GB of data storage space, depending whether the process lays down data single sided, single layer, versus double sided, double layer, will likely soon become the medium of choice for reference material. 

From the outset, Microsoft has had to deal with the critical review of their selected material in Encarta, since in truth, Encarta is not actually the electronic equivalent of an existing hard copy set of encyclopedias, as is the case with World Book. Over the years, the continual increase in the amount and quality of the information in Encarta, along with the proliferation of so many other encyclopedias on CD ROM, has pretty much squelched any further quibbling.

However, all libraries would be wise to add Encarta to a broad repertoire of other CD ROM encyclopedias that without a doubt should include the old standby, Encyclopedia Britannica.

Products Included

Encarta Reference Suite 2000 is the latest annual update to this successful line for Microsoft, to be regularly revised each year. In this Y2K edition, the following describes the key products and the main features within each.

Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2000

This primary component is a multimedia encyclopedia program containing 54,000 articles on a wide range of topics that will appeal to any user. The multimedia features really enrich the experience of searching for and retrieving material on the discs, giving a user a greater depth of information that cannot be achieved by reading a hard copy volume. Sounds, photos, illustrations, videos, InterActivities, and animations bring many topics to life for a user.

Each article in the encyclopedia has a contents page that contains a preview of all related information, and the contents page for longer articles includes an article outline that can be used as hyperlinks to the different sections of the text.

Along with an article outline or the text of the article, the contents page contains several sections you can click on to view information about a topic. These include a media bar at the top of the screen that contains a sample of the multimedia in the article, preview boxes that contain previews of and links to the features and multimedia associated with an article, and callout quotes from within an article.

Clicking a section of an article outline opens the article to the corresponding section, and article pages contain many options for exploring the article and related information. You can click a find feature to search for a word or phrase within an article, click on a related articles hyperlink to take you to a list of related articles, and you can double click on any word in the article to go to its definition in the accompanying dictionary.

Multimedia features in the encyclopedia component are truly rich and diverse, adding greatly to the learning experience, especially for younger users of this important program. While not each of the features is available in all articles, when these do become accessible, the user can use 360-degree panning all around an image, view data charts, interact with a dynamic timeline, get substantive quick facts, read side bar essays, analyze tabular data, watch and listen to video files, wander around in virtual tours, and look at world maps.

(In the DVD ROM version, collages are added, enabling a user to learn about articles through photos, illustrations, videos, and audio clips.)

Interactive World Atlas 2000

This component presents an interactive world atlas containing rich multimedia files with detailed information about places in the world and the people and animals that live there. Included are a detailed map of the world that you can search for cultural information about continents, countries and towns, and geographical information about mountains, oceans, lakes, rivers, and deserts. More than 1.7 million place names on the map are accessible via the atlas.

The atlas contains information about places around the world, including the geography, economy, and population in an area, and you can hear music and see photos of the people and animals that live there. You can go there by typing a name in the search field called the Pinpointer, or by clicking the globe and spinning it to the place of interest.

In the atlas, you can zoom in and out by moving the map, and there are various ways to move around the map. When you click the globe, a menu appears allowing you to choose to view a map of a location, read articles about the society, land or climate of a location, or take your search for information to hand-picked sites on the Web.

Multimedia features in the atlas include a map gallery, a multimedia map, map treks, a statistics center, geography in depth, world tours, world compare, virtual flights, and a geography quiz.

World English Dictionary

The dictionary component is a multimedia reference library that you can use to enhance your written communication and find information on many diverse topics. While Microsoft says the Encarta dictionary is the first newly written English dictionary in 30 years, in truth, this is of course a very different type of dictionary, one built around the availability of rich, dynamic interactivity that can only be found in such an electronic version of a dictionary.

This is the electronic version of the hard copy that some may have already heard of, a joint venture between Microsoft, St. Martin's Press in the US, Bloomsbury Publishing in the UK, and Pan Macmillan in Australia. The design is to provide an authoritative and fascinating record of the written, spoken and electronic forms of English all over the world.

Included in the dictionary are 400,000+ references, 60,000+ audio pronunciations, 1,000+ usage notes, word histories, and more. In addition to the dictionary, there is also a built in thesaurus, collection of quotations, an almanac of statistical data, contemporary facts, geographic information, and trivia, a style guide on proper grammar and punctuation, and a dictionary of computer and Internet related definitions and acronyms.

Research Organizer
This tool enables a user to create, organize, and store notes about information found within this suite. You can copy and paste text and images to use in a report, and you can keep a running list of sources and export your research to a word processor to finish a report.

In articles, you just select the relevant text, and perform standard copying commands common in any Windows compatible program. In the atlas and the dictionary, the process works the same.

The included citation wizard automatically cites each source correctly and builds your bibliography.

Shared System Components

Integrated within these key components are structural aspects of the program that make the multimedia experiences come alive, while also adding heavily to the hard drive space requirements.

These components include the natural language search engine, the text-to-speech engine, a speech recognition engine, and other such shared components. The recommendation is to install all these, in order to fully realize the exciting way this program delivers information.

System Requirements

Multimedia PC with a Pentium 90 or higher processor
Windows 95/98/NT 4.0 with Service Pack 3 or later
24 MB RAM for Win 95/98, 32 MB RAM for Win NT Workstation
135 MB hard drive space (150 MB needed during install)
4X speed CD ROM or faster
Super VGA, 256 color or higher monitor supporting 640 X 480 or higher resolution, 800 X 600 with 16-bit color recommended
Local bus video with 1 MB or more of memory
Microsoft compatible mouse
16-bit sound card with speakers or headphones

Additional Requirements

To use the research organizer, you will need 6 MB additional hard drive space, for the natural language search capabilities, you will need 60 MB extra hard drive space, for speech recognition, 15 MB space and a microphone, for text-to-speech, 9 MB space, and for the dictionary, you will need 110 MB extra space. To use the Encarta Yearbook, Web links, and monthly online updates, you will need Internet access, a Web browser and 2 MB extra hard drive space, and for the world atlas, you will need Internet Explorer 5 or later, included in the CD ROM's, and a user can maintain another default browser after installation.

NOTE: These system requirements are pretty hefty, and as is always the case, the faster the processor and the CD ROM drive, and the more RAM, the better this and any other application will perform. In addition, be sure you have the above mentioned minimum hard drive space available for this program, that can easily end up around 340 MB total.

I also would not recommend attempting to run this program on anything but the minimal processor mentioned. When running these dynamic, complex multimedia files, this really challenges a PC, and users with "older" machines should seriously consider these requirements that are clearly spelled out on the box. This is an example of "state-of-the-art" reference software that will look for today's newer hardware.

Price

Encarta Reference Suite 2000
$99.95 (street prices may vary)
($64.95 with rebate)

The Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2000, Encarta Encyclopedia 2000, Encarta Interactive World Atlas, and the Encarta World English Dictionary are also sold as separate components.

In addition, for a fee of $39.95, you can register for the annual update of Reference Suite 2000, which is an annual bill for each succeeding year's updated versions. Also, when you buy the Reference Suite 2000, you get one year's worth of access to Encarta Online Deluxe, an otherwise additional $49.95 annual fee. This provides monthly updates to the software and hot links to over 19,000 sites recommended by the Encarta editors.

Bottom Line

This multimedia encyclopedia is very competitively priced and targeted for home users, and of the many multimedia encyclopedias now on the market, this one certainly is among the best. For libraries, however, as mentioned above, I suggest including this among a collection of the other electronic encyclopedias, as it would be a mistake to assume only this application would meet their need to provide electronic encyclopedia information to their customers.

With any encyclopedia, there is always the issue of what to include and what to leave out. "All" information cannot ever possibly be contained in any set of encyclopedias, an age-old concern very familiar to librarians, and the answer historically has been to provide a broad scope of diverse encyclopedias from various publishers, as well as to build a collection of diverse reference works that offer the in-depth, specialized material that goes way beyond the general, fundamental knowledge concept that defines all encyclopedias.

For folks on limited budgets, consider the above mentioned separate components as possibly a more manageable investment, and take the family to the library to find access to reference material priced beyond the budgets of most families. For those with a little more flexible budget, consider adding this fine suite of reference material to Microsoft's equally impressive Bookshelf 2000, the CD ROM version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and even possibly one of the other CD ROM encyclopedias, such as World Book, or Compton's.

With any reference material, one has to remember what is provided in the hard copy book, or CD ROM program, is really more a matter of editorial decisions based on limited space, rather than an attempt to provide a comprehensive collection of knowledge.

Go to any sophisticated public or university library, find a couple different sets of encyclopedias (hard copy or CD ROM version), and look up a dozen topics of interest in each set. You might be surprised how different are the results of these searches.