Gale DISCovering Biography CD‐ROM 1.0 (1 CD); Gale DISCovering World History CD‐ROM 1.0 (1 CD)

The intent of this product is to introduce students to historical and contemporary figures to facilitate understanding these individuals’ place in history, providing a personal, rather than conceptual, view of history. Since, in many cases, there are articles for several individuals in the same disciplines, in‐depth study of a subject is possible. There seems to be no other product, either print or electronic, that truly rivals this CD’s content. Products covering a larger number of people are either not as up to date or have shorter articles. The only possible exception, Wilson’s Current Biography, by nature lacks the articles on historical figures that DISCovering Biography includes. DISCovering Biography contains a total of 2007 articles, beginning with King Menes of Egypt (3420 BC ‐ 3345 BC) and ending with the actor Macaulay Culkin (1980 ‐ ), with a heavy emphasis on figures born after 1900, 1116 of the 2007.

Each article is composed of a header summarizing important information, complete biography, selected works (if applicable), suggested readings, and a life and times section, listing each personality’s contemporaries and important events throughout his or her lifetime. Articles range from under 1,000 to over 3,000 words and are up to date, with some current figures’ articles containing facts from as late as January, 1997.

Most articles also contain one portrait of the individual, a reproduction of a stock photograph, painting, or sketch. The images range from bland to unflattering; and many of them are of such poor quality that they add nothing to the article. Some of them do not represent the individuals as they are typically thought of today. While it is important to represent the individuals at the time at which they are or were most renowned, students might identify more strongly with a photograph representing the individuals as they are thought of, particularly if the individual is still a news maker. To include only one image of an individual whose career spanned decades is inadequate.

The layout of the interface is rather inflexible; changing it would allow for more multimedia files — more images and even sound or video clips that would take full advantage of the CD format. Gale acknowledges this lack of multimedia files, indicating that teachers or librarians have the responsibility! for making such relevant information available to students.

Searching DISCovering Biography is fairly straightforward. The Search box at the top of the Main Menu screen is a full text search, but by default executes an OR search, which is less accurate that using the category searches. The Search by Name function should be the most useful. The Search by Subject function has potential to be useful, but turns up odd hits for so many subjects that it could prove to be frustrating for inexperienced users. For example, several persons are returned as hits for “acquired immunodeficiency syndrome,” with no mention of AIDS, viruses, or any related topic. Leo Szilard, an atomic scientist, is a hit in this search, even though he died in 1964, long before the discovery of AIDS. This record is presumably found in the search because of the phrase “an instrument that aids in the study of bacteria.”

The Search by Place option could be problematic, as the pop‐up list only contains places in which individuals were born or died. Because Anne Frank was born and died in Germany, searching on Amsterdam does not retrieve her article.

The Custom search screen allows users to search multiple fields, but sometimes does not turn up complete results, due to indexing inconsistencies. For example, a combined search on the fields of Occupation, Nationality, Gender, and Award using the terms “author, American, female, and Hugo Award” from the pop‐up lists yields one entry, Octavia E. Butler. A full text search using the strategy “hugo NEAR award AND female AND author” yields Octavia Butler and Ursula LeGuin. Examination of the LeGuin article reveals that the Hugo Award she won for her 1969 novel, Left Hand of Darkness, doesn’t appear in the header of the article but further down in the text. If a user types the word “author” in the Occupation field, the search returns 154 hits. If the term “author” is chosen from the pop‐up list, however, the terms that appear in the box are “Author poet writer dramatist screenwriter playwright novelist biographer,” which retrieves 364 entries. Some authors are termed “writers.” Searching on the exploded terms associated with writer, “Writer poet playwright novelist screenwriter dramatist columnist essayist biographer,” only reveals 276 entries.

Documentation includes a User’s Guide, Teacher’s Guide, Help Card, and online help. The User’s Guide walks the system administrator through installation and includes explanations of each command and search screen. In this latter area, the paper documentation proves more useful than the online documentation. The manual contains many sample screens and other illustrations of what the user will encounter. The online documentation lacks these images.

The Help Card contains basic print instructions, but again lacks illustrations to connect the instructions to the actual product. The Teacher’s Guide outlines Gale’s vision of this product’s application, including “Biography Units,” subject‐oriented lesson plans. This guide would prove useful in a secondary education setting where the school’s librarian or media specialist might work closely with teachers; but, in a higher education setting, these ideas may prove more difficult to implement. In an academic library, this tool would best be used as a supplement to other biographical tools. In this arena, the clear advantage of this product over paper format is the hypertext links in the article and the “Contemporaries” section that allow users to research figures in the same discipline or time period.

More consistent subject headings would make both the Custom and Subject searches more accurate and less frustrating for beginning users who may only search one term but not its synonyms. Keyboard shortcuts and improved online help that more closely resemble the User’s Manual would aid in use and navigation. Obvious omissions should be corrected; and Gale should take advantage of the CD format by adding more multimedia files. For this product to remain competitive with Wilson’s Current Biography, it will have to be updated more than once yearly, without a price increase for more frequent updates. In spite of these needs for improvement, DISCovering Biography is a very good version 1.0. The content, ease of installation, and ease of use make this a well‐rounded biographical source for its intended audience, high school through early college. This CD‐ROM is recommended.

DISCovering World History also contains biographies but expands its content by adding essays on historical events, time periods, and social movements, bringing together a thorough information source for the general history of any place or time period. The documentation claims that this product tries to help instill “historical habits of mind” by leading students to think like historians. Having the whole of world history at a student’s fingertips will let him or her browse through the material in web‐like fashion rather than linearly, which will lead to a greater understanding of the “big picture.”

Articles in Discovering World History are of several types. Many biographical articles are divided into “Early Life,” “Life’s Work,” “Summary,” and “Further Reading” sections that put the figure’s entire life into historical context. Essays on historical events are divided into “Principal Personages,” “Summary of Event,” “Impact of Event,” and “Further Reading” sections. Names and events referred to in articles are hyperlinked to other articles to provide access to related information and to show the students how one event or person impacted history over a wider scale than can be represented in a single article.

DISCovering World History contains the same basic search capabilities as DISCovering Biography but has some added features and a different focus. Since there are many more topics than important historical figures, the Search by Name category will not be as important. Because of the necessary emphasis on dates, the timeline is the first search category under the search box on the main menu. An intermediate screen allows the user to choose a broad time period before displaying the timeline screen. Events display in the Search Results box; and, below these, Era Overview Essay choices put the events into context.

In addition to the Name, Place, Timeline, Fulltext, and Custom Search categories, a Primary Documents option appears on the Main Menu screen. This option brings up an alphabetical list of over 100 primary material documents such as personal accounts, news stories, government documents, and excerpts from such important works as the Koran and Darwin’s Origin of Species. Subject access to these documents would expand their usefulness.

The Custom Search screen has fewer categories but allows the user to specify which document types to search. Many of the search categories only apply to certain document types, rendering the feature useless when the correct document type is not selected by the user. The Custom Search screen would be more useful if these categories became grayed out when necessary.

The Search by Place feature has been improved in DISCovering World History. Clicking on this option opens a map of the world. Major regions are hot spots that retrieve another map illustrating the countries of the region. The alphabetical list of places is still available on this screen but would be more useful if cities were associated with their respective states or countries.

The documentation is basically the same as DISCovering Biography, though the online help is better as it contains pictures of the toolbars and other parts of the window that users will encounter. The Teacher’s Guide for this product outlines major themes encountered in historical study such as Civilization and The Modern World. High School teachers may find this guide’s suggested activities useful for introducing students to the vastness of world history. Higher education faculty and librarians may find the Additional Resources section, which lists print and online resources, more useful.

DISCovering World History makes even sparser use of multimedia files, including images and maps for only a few articles. Very few topics refer the user to more than one image or map. There is no use of multimedia files such as sound or video clips, which would make the Primary Documents section more useful. Many pertinent clips have already been digitized; one only has to refer to any multimedia encyclopedia to hear Neal Armstrong’s famous line or watch Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Unlike DISCovering Biography, the Enlarge/caption function in DWH actually contains captions, though there is at least one containing erroneous information: the image of Albert Einstein claims that he won his 1921 Nobel Prize for his Theory of Relativity when, in fact, he won it for the Photoelectric Effect. The correct paper is referred to in the article.

As in DISCovering Biography, the Portrait Gallery is a useless function, allowing the user linear access to all the images contained on the disc, with the only option being to look at the next or previous image.

DISCovering World History is also a very good version 1.0 with only minor improvements needed to enhance its usability and ease of navigation. This product is also recommended for its intended audience, high school through early college.