Apologies to Keats for mashing his beautiful sonnet “”On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” penned in the early years of last century. And apologies to Chapman, for likening him to a CD-ROM player, but just a Keats marvelled at his new view of Greece after being introduced to Homer after Chapman did the translation, I am marvelling at the power of CD-ROM to do things with law and encyclopedias.
And like Keats, I am a late-comer. Most of his companions learnt Greek and did not wait for Chapman. CD-ROMS have been around awhile, especially in the workplace, but to have one in the computer at home, with some useful CDs is different.
So many CDs for computers are rubbish _ vast computing power wasted on games and sound effects. However, an encyclopedia or the volumes of Commonwealth law that take up eight metres of shelves on CD is another matter.
It is quite cute to listen and watch Martin Luther King have a dream in the top left of the computer screen, but it is the word and search power that impresses _ the equivalent of 55,000 pages on one small disk.
In seconds you can search for every occurrence of a word. And the items are listed with the number of occurrences. A search on Beethoven might list Beethoven 19; music 13; composers 12; symphony 6; Mozart 3; piano 1; deafness 1.
With a paper encyclopedia you might look up the Beethoven entry and it might refer you to several other articles, missing the deafness reference. The CD encyclopedia picks up every reference. Moreover, if you search something obscure which does not warrant a separate entry, the CD picks it up.
Alas, the Britannica is not yet on CD-ROM. I have the quite serviceable Multimedia Encyclopedia which comes in the Software Toolworks. It had 20 references in six articles to R. H. Tawney, for example. (Why Tawney? A rival newspaper had a reference to E. H. Tawney, so I had to confirm my sanity.)
Anyway, I owe my Keatsean introduction to CD-ROM to a company appropriately called Reveal. Reveal markets do-it-yourself upgrade kits for computers. The kits include CD-ROM drives, disk drives, hard disks, keyboards, 486 motherboards or any computer bit other than the shell. (Ph 02 3174366. Fax 02 3172406 or computer shops).
Opening the computer’s beige box seems a bit daunting (will the computer ever work again?) but most computers these days are generic parts clipped together and the instructions nurse you through. All you need is a screwdriver.
The $700 mulitmedia kit includes CD-ROM drive, speakers, sound card, microphone, headphones and some CDs containing an encyclopedia, some sound effects and video clips that can be edited and a whole lot of ghastly games. A half-way decent paper encyclopedia costs that much and is harder to use and you cannot cut and paste into your own working documents.
I suspect nearly all reference books will be on CD (and perhaps some only on CD) within five years. The Guinness Book of Records, various dictionaries, thesauruses (thesaurii?) and books of quotations are on CD. The CSIRO’s CD “”Insects a World of Diversity”, for example, does not come in book form because it includes photos and sound effects.
The CSIRO says, “”We didn’t want to simply repackage a book. We wanted “Insects’ to exploit the interactive nature of the medium.”
You can browse and zoom in. As you zoom you get more information.
The CD is on Apple only. ($99). A Windows version, dubbed Winsects by CSIRO boffins, is due in early August. (Phone 03 4187333).
Similarly Investigating Lake Iluka is a CD for teaching about lake ecology. It has text audio and graphics enabling students to explore the lake and conduct tests and then go to text books and collect news reports. ($185 Ph 2735405).
The growth in the CD market should give Australia some export opportunities, according to Canberra-based MDMD Multimedia’s, Marilena Damiano. She says the US market will grown from $250 million now to $15 billion by 1997, mirroring the Sega and Nintendo explosions. Countries with highly educated and technologically literate populations to support a domestic market, like Australia, will get the world-market opportunities.
True, people will prefer paper versions of novels to take on to the beach, but paper reference books are destined for the garbage can of history.