CD ROM reference material still disappoints

Zatni Arbi, Columnist, Jakarta

Writing is indeed a lot of fun. I am truly grateful to God for giving me some ability to write. I have been writing this column for around 10 years now, and all the time I have always been acutely aware that there is a lot of room for improvement in my writing.

One of the difficulties that I always encounter while writing an article is that I seem to get stuck with the same set of words that I have used over and over. Reading does help me learn new expressions and somewhat enrich my choice of words, but when there is not much time left for reading due to the increasing writing assignments that I have, I usually find it hard to find a more elegant way of saying what I want to say.

And, if you use the computer for most of your work like I do, you will also become just too lazy to consult your printed reference materials. That is what has happened to me. My cramped desk gives me yet another reason not to use all the print dictionaries and encyclopedias that are neatly placed on the shelves behind my chair.

To compensate for the laziness to stand up and browse the printed source of references, I always look around for good CD ROM-based reference materials. In particular, I have been searching for a CD ROM-based Roget's Thesaurus.

Finally I found one, the US$ 19.95 Penguin Hutchinson Reference Library. Unfortunately, this software has not been updated, and CDAcess (www.cdaccess.com) only had 19 copies left. I have no idea whether a new version is in the making, especially now that the publisher, Helicon, has sold the Hutchinson branded reference materials to RM plc from the UK.

This particular library consists of nine reference works: Longman Dictionary of the English Language, The Hutchinson Encyclopedia 2001 Edition, Roget's Thesaurus, the Hutchinson Chronology of World History (Compact Edition), the New Penguin Dictionary of Quotations, Helicon Book of Days, Usage and Abusage, The Hutchinson Dictionary of Computing, and the Hutchinson Internet Directory.

The publisher claims that the CD-ROM has eight million words, more than one thousand photos -- many of them from Corel's library -- and 13,500 event timelines. Needless to say, one single CD-ROM is hardly adequate to accommodate this range of information.

Therefore, I started my exploration with rather reduced expectations. To begin with, I knew it would be impossible to have audio files added for the pronunciation of each entry in the dictionary. Being a non-native speaker of English, I have always appreciated the inclusion of pronunciation in a computer-based dictionary.

This product is prepared in cooperation with Penguin. Therefore, it is not a coincidence that Penguin Dictionary of Quotation is included. The encyclopedia contains a good collection of images, though, including an aerial picture of Turin in Italy. The Helicon Book of Days, for example, tells us that India and Pakistan signed a cease-fire on June 30, 1965. Will the same event happen again 37 years later? Let us hope so.

The user interface feels quite outdated. I was not really able to tell where the scroll button on my mouse would work and where it would not. In the Content panel on the left, it turned out, that the scroll function was not available. The only way to go up and down the list inside the pane is to click on the arrows in the scrollbar.

Hypertext links are used to allow us to jump from one entry to another, and the program keeps a history of our searches called Trail. However, if you make a typo when entering your search keyword, you will have to wait until the program finishes accessing the CD-ROM before you can correct it.

One of the biggest drawbacks of this reference library is that it uses a browser with no specific icon to distinguish it from the other instances of the browser. So, when switching from one opened application to another, I almost always skipped the library because its icon was the same as the other Internet Explorer 6.0 that were running on my PC.

Another big one is the fact that the contents were not copied to the hard disk during installation. This forces us to keep the CD-ROM inside the drive. If you have a slow CD-ROM drive, you will not like delay in its access, either.

Clearly, this collection does not represent the best that a CD ROM-based reference library could offer. I will certainly continue to search for a better set of reference materials to help me in my writing. In the meantime, I shall try to make the most of this one.

Hutchinson also produces several other reference materials, such as The Hutchinson Encyclopedia of Music, The Hutchinson History Library, The Hutchinson Science Library. It seems, though, that they will have to work harder to compete with the growing number of publishers that are churning out excellent reference materials.