Where do you start reviewing the Encyclopedia Britannica? Do you start at a and work through to z? It's not like reviewing a movie where you watch the main feature, look at the extras and then rack your brain for something witty and erudite to say. The only common ground with a DVD review is that the entire reference work comes on a single DVD and therefore takes up an awful lot less room than the paper equivalent. Judging from the illustration on the box, this one disc is the equivalent of sixty-odd volumes of books, and I haven't got a shelf long enough or strong enough to carry such an extensive work. I suspect that if I had that edition, I'd end up building a small fort out of it.

The DVD edition is therefore something of a letdown if you're used to acquiring your knowledge by gross weight. In the pack, you get a single DVD-5 (a single-side, single-layer disc) of the variety you'd get a bare-bones movie release on. With it comes a quick-start installation guide and a couple of leaflets about the paper version and the benefits of the registration programme. In one of these leaflets, the benefits of this edition start to become more obvious. Bottom line – the full sixty-odd volume hard-copy version of the Encyclopedia Britannica will set you back in the region of £1000 where the electronic version is a mere bagatelle at around £60. For that – according to the box – you get the same content, but of course in a form that you’re not stuck painstakingly transcribing into a report.

Jitendar Canth's review of the 2003 edition refers closely to Chris Cox's review of the 2002 release of the software, so similarly I've referred to Jitendar's views of the software and whether any of his criticisms have been addressed in this new release.

The 2005 Edition includes the features of the 2003 edition:
The Full Encyclopaedia Britannica
Britannica Student Encyclopaedia
Britannica Elementary Encyclopaedia
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary
Merriam-Webster's Student Dictionary
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Thesaurus
Merriam-Webster's Student Thesaurus
World Atlas
Timelines
Research Organiser
Knowledge Navigator
Weblinks and Online Magazines
Online Updates

And the addition of the Britannica Classics – articles from famous contributors including Freud, Houdini, Marie Curie and Orville Wright. Information can also be filtered and organised using the new Britannica BrainStormer feature.

The latest version of the EB is simplicity itself to install, as the DVD-ROM holds your hand all the way and doesn't do anything scary like some software packages I can mention, so the trials and tribulations Jitendar faced installing the 2003 editions didn't manifest themselves with me. You have a range of installation and running options with the minimum option requiring the presence of the DVD-ROM in the drive at all times. The full installation transfers the hefty 4.3Gb capacity of the disc to your hard drive, but once there doesn't trouble you any more.

The system requirements are only slightly hiked from the 2003 edition - the suite needs a 350Mhz Pentium running Windows 98SE or above (or a 350Mhz G3 Mac running OS 10.3); 256Mb RAM, 550Mb free hard disk space, a DVD-ROM drive (of course) and a display running at 800x600 resolution. Multimedia kit and internet access are "recommended".

Once running, the Encyclopedia offers three basic modes of operation - or "libraries" - the full monty Encyclopedia Britannica Library which allows unfiltered access to the information, the intermediate Student Library and the most basic Elementary Library, aimed at younger users. These libraries simply filter the information according the level of detail the user requires.

The software is largely intuitive - just a question of pointing and clicking and keying in words or part-words. The new Britannica Brainstormer allows the user to put forward a single topic and the system will offer a variety of spin-off topics allowing the user to follow a train of thought from a central idea. Of course, manipulation of the information is where the great strength of an electronic form of the EB lies.

Looking at the hard-copy edition of the EB, and knowing the same information is available on the electronic version, I know there's a lot of information there. The browsing index which appears down the left-hand side of the screen while searching for information shows thousands of headings. 100,288 topics to be precise. 300,000 dictionary entries, 497,000 thesaurus entries, 17,891 images, multimedia and maps and 646 video and audio clips.

I was disappointed by the latest edition of the EB. Maybe I had my sights set too high, or more likely I know how much information can be fitted on to a DVD-ROM, but I found much of the entries to be a little too brief to be genuinely useful. It didn't help that a lot of the references I keyed into the search engine came up blank - but then that might be the sort of mind I've got. References to the cinema - hey, this is a DVD site primarily - are somewhat thin on the ground. My gauge of erudition has always been Edward Everett Horton. If you know who he was, you're my kind of people, but the EB didn't.

As a quick, electronic look-it-up resource, Britannica 2005 is without peer. It’s certainly the cornerstone of anyone’s reference library, but for specialist reference it’s too much of a jack-of-all-trades to go into anything with any great depth. However, it’s distinctly safer than going online for a Google, especially for youngsters.

Mark Oates

	Interface	Features	Value	Overall
	5	5	7	6