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It's no wonder Grolier makes such a good encyclopedia for students. The company was the first to license a text-only, electronic encyclopedia to schools, and the first to release its encyclopedia in CD-ROM format. Grolier's parent company, Scholastic, has been in the education business for years. Simply put, the Grolier people have been packaging educational content for a long time, and they're skilled at it.

The $50 Grolier 2001 Multimedia Encyclopedia Deluxe Edition includes more than 38,000 articles on disc, 22,000 additional articles (which you can access online by clicking links at the bottom of an encyclopedia page), 16 hours of sound clips, about 15,000 images, 1200 maps, 174 videos, and a supplemental dictionary, thesaurus, and atlas. Those numbers more or less match up with the competition, Microsoft Encarta Deluxe ($50) and World Book ($59).

The difference, as always, is in the interface. Grolier's look remains basically the same as in previous editions, although the display areas are a little larger and less cluttered. The design is less flashy than Encarta's or World Book's, but easier to handle--and ultimately better suited for younger students and computer novices.

What's New for 2001

A new addition to the 2001 edition is the Topic Navigator, which organizes the roughly 150,000 text and media items into a directory format much like Yahoo's online directory system. For example, if you're writing a report on fish, you start with the top-level Life Science topic and drill down to Animals/Vertebrates/Fish. More than 400 articles, pictures, diagrams, and charts concerning fish are arranged alphabetically in the left window. Double-click any entry, and the article (or picture, chart, or other item) will appear in the main viewing pane.

Grolier has also expanded its online options. As with the previous edition, Grolier 2001 provides free access to two additional online encyclopedias when you buy the disc. The New Book of Knowledge is aimed at elementary school kids, and features age-appropriate topics and reading levels, while the Encyclopedia Americana is skewed toward high school, college, and adult users. The Grolier editorial staff also maintains article-specific Web links, which are updated monthly, for both encyclopedias.

The improved Research Starter feature is an ideal way to get kids on to their reports in a hurry. Hundreds of "starter topic" areas are supplied, from air pollution to Zen Buddhism. For example, if you select Arthur and Arthurian Legends, you get a paragraph of historical context; a list of suggested report topics (such as "Discuss the early Welsh and English sources of Arthurian legend, as well as Malory's French sources"); a glossary; and links to related encyclopedias, both on disk and online. Remember the days of trudging to the library and poring over an assortment of books to find your report information? Those days are gone.

New to the package is an expanded dictionary function, including the American Heritage College Dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, and the American Heritage Spanish/English Dictionary. The dictionary function is integrated, so you need only to double-click any word in an article text to call up its full definition.

Grolier's Timeline feature (expanded for this version), a de rigueur tool in today's multimedia encyclopedias, is useful for students but perhaps even more fascinating for adults. This interactive feature is a refreshing way to sort history, and it's something that could not be performed without a computer. Call up Europe in the years from 1500 to 1600 and you'll see, in time line form, historic events unfolding simultaneously across the continent: Shakespeare publishes Hamlet; Luther posts his 95 theses; Copernicus heralds the scientific revolution; the Ottoman Empire peaks, then fades. Each historical event is linked directly to related articles and media. It's a great resource, and fun to browse.

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