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Encyclopedia Britannica took a giant step in late 1997 by introducing its first ever multimedia encyclopedia: Encyclopedia Britannica CD 98.
... Long awaited, Encyclopedia Britannica has long been at the head of the world's foremost print edition encyclopedias. But alas, the days of door-to-door traveling encyclopedia salespeople has gone from the scene - now replaced by more convenient (and less expensive) published works on CD-ROM. ... And the high costs of producing and updating print encyclopedias may also herald an end to print-edition multivolume encyclopedias in the very near future.
EB's first ventures into the CD-ROM world resulted in the complete text of the printed work, but no multimedia. ... With the CD-ROM encyclopedia world already at a fast pace with Microsoft's Encarta, Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia, and a host of others, Encyclopedia Britannica is a latecomer to the scene. Not to be outdone, with its in-depth Encyclopedia Britannica database of valuable
text, EB has launced this two-disc multimedia CD-Rom with all the "bells and whistles".
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Britannica CD 98's graphic.al interface shell is built around Microsoft's Internet Explorer (Version 3.02), unlike the earlier EB CD-ROM built around the Netscape browser.
Features of Britannica CD 98 include:
* A newly designed graphical user interface
* 72,000 articles (7,000 more than before)
* More than 1.4 million hypertext links to related articles
* 15,000 related Internet links
* Over 8,500 photos and images
* Over 1,200 maps
* Sound and video/animation files
* The Merriam-Webster Collegiate* Dictionary lOth Edition
* Britannica Books of the Year (1994-1997) Six major Britannica CD 98 features at the opening screen include:
* Spectrum - This categorizes and classifies the world's knowledge and uses icons to show how human knowledge is related. Subjects include: matter and energy, the Earth, life on Earth, human life, human society, art, technology, religion, the history of Mankind, and the branches of knowledge.
* Compass - This contains world maps offering geographic and statistical information about nations and regions of the world.
* Analyst - This feature compares and analyzes economic, political, and social data of 191 countries and regions throughout the world.
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