African‐American History and Culture: CD‐ROM Encyclopedia contains a vast amount of material on African‐American history and culture. The main menu offers the following features: timeline, biographies, encyclopedia, historical documents, history books, gallery, maps and charts, audio and video, and W.E.B. DuBois’s Exhibit of American Negroes.
The timeline is a hyperlinked timeline that covers the major events in the past five centuries of African‐American history. It serves as the main organizational structure for the CD as most of the entries on the main menu are subdivided by historical eras: 1400s‐1775, 1776‐1819, 1820‐1860, 1861‐1865, 1866‐1876, 1877‐1928, 1929‐1940, 1941‐1954, 1955‐1971, and 1972‐ . Readers have the option of selecting a particular era or all entries.
The biographies section includes 1600 biographies of historical and contemporary figures selected from 22 “Facts on File” print titles.
The encyclopedia contains 400 entries, definitions and descriptions of terms, events, and topics culled from The Encyclopedia of Africa‐American Heritage and other “Facts on File” print titles.
Historical documents includes 150 primary source documents, such as the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, The Reconstruction Acts, and Sojourner Truth’s “A’n’t I a Woman?” speech. It even includes the closing arguments in the O. J. Simpson trial (September 26‐28, 1995). Many of these documents come from Facts on File’s Landmark Documents in American History CD‐ROM.
History books includes the full text of 13 “Facts on File” books. These books do not seem to be arranged in any particular order. They are not in alphabetical order by title or in chronological order by date of publication.
The gallery contains 770 photographs, paintings, cartoons, portraits, and other images that depict key figures and events. A caption explaining its historical significance accompanies each image.
Maps and charts include 130 annotated graphs, tables, maps, and charts that present geographical and statistical data about the past and present African‐American population.
The audio and video section includes 12 audio clips and 17 video clips of significant historical and cultural moments. There’s the expected “I have a dream” speech as well as four excerpts from Thurgood Marshall’s November 10, 1966 speech at a symposium on “the role of the Negro lawyer in the context of social change” and four clips of Louie Armstrong. The video clips include the famous Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling fight (June 22, 1938), Jesse Owens & Cornelius Jordan at the Berlin Olympics (1936), and two clips of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. However, we could not get the videos to play properly and sometimes encountered erratic performance problems when attempting to do so.
W.E.B. DuBois’s “Exhibit of American Negroes” is an archival reconstruction of W.E.B. DuBois’s exhibit on American blacks at the 1900 World’s Fair.
The product uses the Logos Library System as its search engine and interface. This is a powerful text engine that was designed for biblical studies. The toolbar consequently has View options (Bible Reference Browser and Sync Browser which allows viewing several Bible versions simultaneously and synchronizes scrolling of the text to keep all the versions in sync) that don’t make any sense with this product. Also, the Tools option lists Unlock Books or Collections which was designed to control the licensing and use of biblical concordances, dictionaries, histories, commentaries, etc. Logos Library System supports interactivity between all books in a library when searching and linking across multiple books. Because it uses Unicode, it also supports Eastern and Western languages and the embedding of words and phrases of right‐to‐left languages like Hebrew into left‐to‐right text such as English. The very powerful search engine locates words or phrases anywhere on the CD and highlights the results.
A topic browser window appears to the left of the main window. It is organized both by era and by topics, with entries listed beneath the topic window. The installation recommends setting a screen resolution of 800 × 600; but the nine‐point type can appear too small for easy viewing. One can change the font by editing the user preferences; but this does not change the size. One can change the size from the View option on the toolbar or use Control‐Shift‐< and Control‐Shift‐>. One can also use the product at 640 × 480 resolution and close the topic browser window. It can be activated at any time and overlays the main window.
African‐American History and Culture: CD‐ROM Encyclopedia is a thorough subject encyclopedia in coverage. Many entries are brief; but the synergy of all the various components from a variety of sources and the links between related entries provide students and researchers with a rich web of information. The powerful Logos Library System search engine is a good selection for this well‐executed product.
