Reference Titles on CD-ROM

Descriptions for highlighted titles follow this list. You may click on a highlighted title to go directly to its description.

American Sign Language Dictionary
Athena: Classical Mythology
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Katalog 1501-1840 (Bavarian State Library Catalogue)
Bodleian Library
Canadian Index
Carolina 1997 Alumni Directory
Cinemania '95
Columbia World of Quotations
Diccionario de la Lingua Espana
Film Index International
The Foundation Grants Index
Gale's Quotations
Index Islamicus
International Annual Bibliography of Festschriften
Le Robert Electronique (see Lit.)
Microsoft Bookshelf
Microsoft Encarta '94
Microsoft Encarta Africana
Microsoft Encarta World English Dictionary
Munich Catalogue of Early Printed Books
Oxford Duden German Dictionary
Oxford Spanish Dictionary
Random House Unabridged Dictionary
Robert Electronique--See Literature
Russian National Bibliography
Samuel Johnson Dictionary of the English Language
World's Greatest Speeches

Athena: Classical Mythology
Mythopedia, Inc., 1995.

Athena provides profiles of mythical figures & classical works, and often includes illustrations from classical sources as well as family trees. Summaries for more than 1,200 myths are drawn directly from classical sources. It also includes the full text of more than twenty classical translations with standard line numbering.

Navigation is quite straightforward. Hypertext links (in blue) to an A-Z directory may be accessed by double-clicking. For example, by double-clicking on "P," then within the P Group on "Perseus," this brings you to a summary of the Perseus legend (with hyperlinks embedded), links to "all related myths" as well as links to the full text of Ovid and Apollodorus. There are several illustrations of Perseus and genealogies for "Zeus & Mortal Women" and "House of Danus."

A browse function allows for keyword index access, and it is also possible to search the entire database using the Query Function. A Table of Contents function provides a breakdown of sections and sub-sections within the database. Text or illustrations may be tagged for printing or downloading. A Backtrack function allows you to retrace your steps by providing a "trail" of your hypertext links and queries.

Cinemania '95
Microsoft Corporation

Columbia World of Quotations

This disk contains 65,000 quotations that can be searched by subject, author, title word, title of work and location therein of a particular quotation, and publication date. Additionally, one can search an author's nationality, profession, period (century), and gender. Other searches identify the name of a character in a movie, play or novel. "Advanced search" allows Boolean searching. While the "help" feature gives some information, the software is, in general, extremely cumbersome to use. Searching for quotations by an author brings up the quotes in alphabetical order. For prolific authors like Shakespeare locating a particular quotation can be tedious if one does not know some words from the quote. The "browse" feature works for author, speaker and subject -- but not very quickly.

Gale's Quotations: Who Said What?
Gale Research Inc., c1995.

This is a database of approximately 117,000 quotations drawn from a variety of sources but most notably from Gale's Almanac of Famous People. Most but not all entries provide the source of the quotation. The principal indexes allow for searching by author/speaker, keyword, or by a listing of quotations. A more extensive search mode allows for Boolean (and/or/not) searching within indexes (e.g., "history and bunk" within Keyword), adjacency and proximity searching, and truncation. In addition to the three principal indexes, the extended mode provides additional indexes for searching by quotation source, career highlights, nationality, birth year and death year. Any combination of these indexes may be searched in this mode.

Microsoft Bookshelf '94
Microsoft Corporation

The disk includes the contents of seven reference titles, which can be searched singly, all at once, or by a selection of two or more. The works included are:

• The American Heritage Dictionary
• Longman's Original Roget's Thesaurus
• The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia
• The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations
• The Hammond Atlas
• The Peoples Chronology
• The World Almanac and Book of Facts

Basic searching allows you to select all of the works, or any one. You can browse a Table of Contents; use Find to search for a word, phrase, or Boolean combination in the texts; browse or search the Gallery of sound, illustration, animation, and video entries; or consult Backlist to see a summary of your searches.

[NOTE: The sound offerings are very soft so you will want to adjust the volume to loud, as opposed to toning it down as is necessary for the talking dictionary.]

Advanced Find allows you to do word, phrase or Boolean (and/or/not) searching and in addition to limit your search to the text of a current entry, or to select two or more of the reference titles to be searched.

Crossways searching can be done by selecting color-highlighted words from the text of an article or entry, or by right-clicking the mouse on any word, so it is very easy to move from one work to another for information. Once you have an entry you also can use forward and back arrows to move from entry to entry within one of the works.

Information can be stored as a Note (under the Edit pull-down) or printed or downloaded using the Print function (available as a button or on the File pull-down). (There is a copy command which as far as I can tell works only if you are using this product in Windows with Microsoft Word or other software to copy the information to.)

The online help for this product is pretty good and on the whole it's very easy to use, particularly for quick information, which seems to me to be its most appropriate use.

Microsoft Encarta
Microsoft Corporation

This 1994 product contains the complete text of the latest version of Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia, and the American Heritage Dictionary (office edition). There are 1,000 new articles, written especially for Encarta. This product is good for all levels of study, especially for junior high through general adult.

Encarta features audio clips, graphics, video, interactive charts, timeline of history, and an atlas.

Mozart: String Quartet in C Major, K. 465, the "Dissonant" - Mac
Voyager Company

Random House Unabridged Dictionary

The Random House Unabridged Electronic Dictionary contains all of the features in the second printed edition of the dictionary but also provides:

• 115,000 recorded pronunciations
• option to print and download definitions
• ability to search for a word by combining keywords from its definition with AND, OR, NOT, and ( ). For example, entering female AND elephant will retrieve cow.
• "Wildcard" feature that allows you to look up words when only some of the letters are known. For example, to find a 6-letter word that starts with om and ends with om, type sh??om. If you wanted to find words that rhyme with aflame, you could search for *ame.
• an anagram feature, which retrieves all of the words that can be formed from the letters of a word you enter. For example, type glean and find angle, angel, Lange, and others.

World's Greatest Speeches
Softbit, Inc.
"Over 400 of the greatest speeches in world history"

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