Claimed to be the most comprehensive and authoritative guide to golf courses in Britain and Ireland, this interactive CD‐ROM provides details on more than 2,600 courses. In addition to providing essential information such as course type and length, playing restriction and green fees, this guide also provides details on such topics as scorecards, club and bar facilities and pro‐shop information. Contact details, including name of club secretaries and professionals, are also included.
Users can also use the CD to assist them to plan their journey to the course itself and identify local accommodation. All such information can be printed off to provide the user with hard copy. The intention is to revise and enhance the product annually. Some of the planned enhancements include more photographs of the courses, the inclusion of video clips and full course plans. The producers are also investigating the feasibility of direct Internet access to golf Web sites.
The obvious question is whether this format is the most suitable one for a guide to golf courses. What does a CD‐ROM version offer that printed copy does not? Apart from keeping down the cost, the CD‐ROM version is easily transportable so that it can be used wherever the enthusiast is currently based, provided of course that he or she has a notebook PC or laptop with them and that this is equipped with a CD‐ROM drive and powerful processor. The answer to the question, I guess, lies in whether the guide is needed more in the home or on the golf course itself. Printing off details for each and every fairway, just in case it might be needed on the fairway, would be time‐consuming and relatively expensive. The real value of this format is that it is searchable on a number of fields: club name, course name, architect, country (England, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales), county, status (public/private). However, its performance on my Pentium 75 with 16 Mb of RAM was a little slow, although the minimum system requirements are a 486, with 5 Mb RAM, double speed CD‐ROM drive, 8 bit‐sound card and Windows 3.1.
It is my view that this guide should confine itself to providing a rapidly searchable database and leave the more detailed information, such as detail of each hole, to course brochures and other printed formats. Provided that the trend for members of the public to network electronically continues, then one assumes that a Web version, with its facility to be continually updated, handle bookings and purchases, interface in a seamless fashion with other sources of useful related information such as travel, the weather, etc., will eventually replace the need for a CD‐ROM version.
In terms of presentation, the format was generally satisfactory, with good, although at times dull (coloured) graphics. Given the insatiable appetite for golf in Britain and the rapidly growing number of courses up and down the country as farmers sell off or develop their land as a consequence of European Union agricultural policy, the market for the product looks very promising. At £19.99 I think it represents good value for money and will be a valuable asset to the public library reference collection.
