The American Indian: A Multimedia Encyclopedia ver. 2.0 is a hybrid CD‐ROM for DOS, Windows, and Macintosh. It comprises the text and maps from six Facts on File titles: Voices of the Winds: Native American Legends (1989; now out of print), Who Was Who in Native American History: Indians and Non‐Indians from Early Contacts through 1900 (1990), World Dance: the Language of Native American Culture (1994), Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes (1990), Atlas of the North American Indian, and Encyclopedia of Native American Religions (1992). The last three titles have had revised print editions appear in late 1999/early 2000. A Web version of The American Indian: A Multimedia Encyclopedia should appear by mid‐2000. We expect that it will include the revised versions of the source titles. The titles of the CD and the corresponding print publications focus primarily on North American Indians, but they also cover Mexico, Canada, the Arctic, Mesoamerican civilizations, Caribbean and South American tribes.
The main menu offers buttons to locate information by tribes, history, folklore, religion, biographies, reference shelf, and multimedia gallery. The Tribes button allows locating information about specific tribes by name or by region. Regions include: Arctic, subarctic, northwest, southwest, Plains, Great Basin, California, northeast, southeast, Plateau, all regions, and other areas.
The History button goes to a submenu that offers other buttons to focus on early civilizations, culture and customs, wars and rebellions, land disputes, and discovery/ exploration. These subdivisions are also used by the history and exploration timelines in Reference Shelf.
The Folklore, Religion, and Biographies buttons offer two further buttons which are complementary. One allows searching topics alphabetically while the other organizes the topics by tribe. The alphabetic entries are usually shorter (one or two paragraphs) than the topics. Alphabetic buttons appear raised except when there is no corresponding information. The multimedia gallery allows perusal of entries by media type: audio, video, photos/portraits, or maps.
The Reference Shelf includes primary source documents, a glossary, timelines for both history and exploration (but there are no links to corresponding topics), and a list of museums and societies. The buttons of the secondary menus for the multimedia gallery and the reference shelf transliterated the labels into Greek characters. Museums and societies can be identified by location or organization name for both the USA and Canada. It is up to date, including information about the Mashantucket Pequot Museum in Ledyard, CT, which opened in late 1998. Searchers can identify documents related to particular tribes or the people related to them. As many of the documents consist of treaties, a button lists the treaty names and the dates.
Trying to locate the Pequots (or Pequod) and the Ojibwa with the Tribe button, however, made us think that there was no coverage of these tribes. Using the Search button at the bottom of almost every screen produced 125 entries for the Pequots, including a lengthy article on the Pequot War, and 147 for the Ojibwa. This search feature has some interesting capabilities. As one types letters in the Search For window, the Words Available window goes to the nearest match. This helps identify variant spellings such as Mohican, Mohegan, and Mahican. The entry for Algonkin explains:
Indian tribal names can be confusing. Alternate names or different spellings of the same name are often used. Sometimes the Indians themselves use different names for their tribes than those given by whites. Or tribes may be known by names given to them by another tribe. Moreover, early historians may have applied names inconsistently. There were often French versions from French‐speaking historians, explorers or traders, as well as English versions. In the case of the southern and southwestern Indians who lived in territories where the Spanish settled in North America, there were sometimes varying Spanish names as well. The use of the name Algonquian or Algonquin or Algonkin is an example of possible confusion. Different writers use different spellings. To add to the mix‐up, the name is sometimes used to discuss one small Canadian tribe, the people who originally held the name. But at other times it is used to denote many different tribes who spoke a common language but who were spread all over the Northeast and other areas as well. One might see the phrase the Algonquian proper to distinguish the original tribe from other Algonquian‐speaking peoples. Another way is to use the Algonkin spelling for the original tribe and to use the Algonquian spelling for the whole language family of tribes.
As the search engine identifies the closest entry, it lists the word in the Results window along with the total number of occurrences. Double clicking a word from the Words Available window enters the term in the Search For window; but it does not replace what one typed. We sometimes experienced General Protection Fault errors doing this. The Operators window offers an impressive number of options: &, ∧, |, ∼, \and, \not, \or, \xor, :1, { }, *, ****, and #. Searchers will understand the meaning of some of these operators but probably not all of them. Yet, the ondisc help does not explain their meaning, and the documentation that comes in the cover of the jewel case only covers the installation process.
The Tools button on the navigation bar allows saving pictures and text, viewing search history, creating or running tours (slide shows or presentations), adding topics to a tour, and saving a tour. There is no cut and paste option, so when one saves text to disk, one copies the entire article and must then select the desired portions.
The entries offer a good introduction or overview to a topic, as an encyclopedia should. However, despite its breadth of coverage, The American Indian: A Multimedia Encyclopedia is not a one‐stop solution for serious research. For example, the long article on Indians in the American Revolution glosses over the Battle of Bennington (VT) without mentioning the important role of the Indians. Nor does the article mention the massacre of 20‐year‐old Jane McRea that galvanized the colonials and resulted in a great increase in recruits, sealing the fate of General Burgoyne and leading to his surrender at Saratoga. However, a four‐paragraph biography of John Burgoyne devotes an entire paragraph to the incident; and there is a biographical entry under the variant spelling Jane MacCrea.
The American Indian: A Multimedia Encyclopedia is a very good product that combines several reference sources and makes searching for information easy and enjoyable. Topics not identifiable from the main access points can usually be retrieved with the search function. We could not identify a single topic about which we could not locate at least some information. Many of the entries contain printed pronunciation information, particularly for tribal names. A multimedia encyclopedia should replace these notes with an authoritative audio pronunciation.
