Computercol/19″/dt1st/mark2nd

By T.R. REID and BRIT HUME

The new school year has begun, and somehow, the kids’ homework seems more challenging this year for us parents, at least. Of course, we used to know the answers to almost all their questions (“Where are the Spice Islands?” “What’s a parabola?”) with minimal strain. As the kids get older, though, we find ourselves falling back on the all-time parental cop-out: “Hey, I’m not supposed to do your homework for you.”

One place for the kids to look up almost anything, of course, is the Internet. Just about every datum you’d ever want to know is on the Net somewhere. But that creates a problem in itself.

The ocean of information on the Internet is so vast that it can be difficult and time-consuming to find a specific droplet. Tell the kids to look up “Spice Islands” in a search engine, for example, and they could spend the next five nights digging through citations.

Of course, you could buy the family an encyclopedia. But this can be expensive; a multi-volume encyclopedia costs more than a desktop computer these days. Those heavy books take up a lot of shelf space, and in our changing world they become obsolete fairly quickly.

There’s a middle ground: the CD-ROM encyclopedia. This spectacular invention is one of the greatest achievements of the computer revolution. If your household doesn’t have one, it should.

A CD-ROM encyclopedia puts all the text and pictures of a 15-volume encyclopedia on one or two CD-ROM disks, readable on your home computer. This new form of encyclopedia includes words, graphics, sound, movies, and computerized search capability. The price is around one-twentieth the cost of the same reference material in printed form. And if you feel the material on the disk is out-of-date, the programs make it simple to connect to the Internet and find the relevant current information.

In the past, we’ve raved about Microsoft’s Encarta and the CD-ROM edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Recently, we’ve been happily using another worthy entry in this highly competitive field, “Compton’s ’99 Encyclopedia Deluxe” (Mindscape, www.mindscape.com).

The new Compton’s is slightly less expensive (about $40) than Encarta and Britannica, and geared to a younger audience. It would be fine as a general-use family encyclopedia, but it is really designed for bright elementary school kids, or middle school and high school students. The style is lively; articles read more like a magazine than a reference book. There are constant references to pictures, charts and sound bites related to the text.

To differentiate itself in the market, Compton’s includes a mechanism to help school kids put together research papers. It helps a young writer choose the topics to look up, keep notes, organize important data and compile a bibliography. We wouldn’t want our kids to get dependent on this crutch, but as a tool for somebody who doesn’t yet have basic report-writing skills, it’s not bad.

We also appreciate the automatic citation feature: If somebody copies text from the encyclopedia and pastes it into a paper, the encyclopedia automatically generates a citation to tell the teacher where the words came from. Compton’s comes with a built-in atlas, a dictionary and a thesaurus. It’s easy to click on a word or a place name in the text of an article and get an instant definition or map.

The best added feature, though, is the Planetarium. If you’re looking up, say, the Orion nebula, the encyclopedia will take you to a map of the night sky and show you how to find the constellation Orion and the star cluster in it. You can even set the Planetarium to “Time Lapse” mode and watch the constellations in their path across the sky over your house any night of the year.

Like other reference ROMs, Compton’s provides one-click access to the Internet to get updated information on the topic you’re researching. Of course, you could just go to the Web yourself, but this program helps cut through info-glut on the Internet. For a specific fact, we found it faster to search the Web through Compton’s than through one of the Internet search engines.

Our chief complaint is with the audio portion of this encyclopedia. Almost every piece of music is reduced to a simplified synthesizer rendition rather than an actual performance. Even worse, many pieces aren’t even identified; there’s a bite called “A Sousa March,” but the program doesn’t tell you which march it is. If music is a key reason for your choice of a reference work, Encarta is a better choice.

T.R. Reid is London bureau chief of the Washington Post. Brit Hume is managing editor of Fox News in Washington. You can reach them in care of the Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St., Washington D.C. 20071-9200, or you can e-mail T.R. Reid at [email protected] and Brit Hume at [email protected].