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2002 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia

2002 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia

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Being the first multimedia encyclopedia—the premier edition was released in 1986—isn't a huge advantage for Grolier. The current product is, however, a good middle-of-the-road entry, especially for those on a budget: It's nearly $50 cheaper than our Editors' Choice, Encarta, but has more substantial content than the low-priced World Book.

Installation is simple, but not having the option to install all the software on your hard drive is irritating. You have to have one of the two CDs in your CD-ROM drive each time you want to start the application.

The interface is pretty average—not as fancy as Encarta but less likely than Britannica to confuse you or lead you into a navigational dead. One annoyance is the way the Simple and Complex searches work. Miyamoto Musashi didn't show up on the Simple search, which is supposed to find "all articles that contain the word(s) you have typed." Strangely, using the Complex search with the Boolean operator AND limiting the searches to only entries containing both words, Musashi turned up. In addition, the engine was sluggish—the slowest of the bunch—and its guesses were irrelevant. Searching under the Atlas tab for a map of Hoboken, the closest Grolier found was a map of Herbert Expeditions to the Arctic, in 1968-69. Maps, though less interactive than Encarta's, are far more attractive than those of Britannica.

Content, when it showed up, was solid. Our Hoboken search results were comparable to Britannica's and more specific than Encarta's. On a fruitless quest for a map of the city, though, we instead found a Currier and Ives print of the first baseball game. In general, articles were reasonably complete and quite well hyperlinked. Although we didn't find vast amounts of multimedia content, what was there was well integrated—nearly on a par with Encarta. Bagpipes content included an audio file. The timelines functioned better than Britannica's but contained less information. You see only a few individual events here and there, but mostly you find essays that cover hundreds of years in a general way. The nutmeg search returned a strong mix of historical articles and botanical images, about 20 links—comparable to Encarta's results.

In our current events search, we found a useful article on the Taliban but no mention of Osama bin Laden; we hoped to find more through the online Access New Articles function or the updated Web links. Accessing new articles (about 30 were available) did not return any mention of the Taliban or Osama bin Laden. There was, however, an obituary for singer Perry Como.

The huge flaw in this procedure is that the new articles are not integrated with local content. You have to remember to hit the Access New Articles tab each time you do a search. Contrast this with Encarta, which downloads articles and adds them as Article Update sidebars alongside original articles. And updating the Web links is more trouble than it's worth. We had to manually download FLAGFILE.EXE, laboriously select the proper folder, and then run the executable in a DOS window. Online content is a mixed bag. The links seem good, but some of the additional sources, which aim to add different reading levels to the application, don't make the articles seem simpler—just shorter.

Finally, as befits a product marketed by Scholastic (which now owns Grolier), there is a Research Center, aimed at teaching new users how to make the most of the program. You'll find a series of how-to essays covering a variety of subjects, ranging from term papers to Internet research. There are also sample seeds for research projects, with themes, links to articles, and points to consider. Typical topics include Impressionism and the Irish Literary Renaissance.

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