Description:
Simon & Schuster's New Millennium Children's Encyclopedia makes a good attempt at providing an interesting resource for preteens. The subject area is broad, and the dialogue is understandable and concise. Any young reader would enjoy the interface: a space-alien motif dominates the main menu and subsequent navigation. Getting around in the application is easy and clear. The Research Center, in particular, is where the user will spend the most time. Here you will find a search mode, a media gallery, and binders. Searching is precise: you can specify searching for content in titles, in the article itself, or using multiple query words. One of the most useful features of the application may be the binders function. Collecting a variety of articles together, highlighting and noting in-text, and exporting them for printing or further studying is all very easy to do. Unfortunately, the New Millennium Children's Encyclopedia falls short in several key areas. While the extensive options panel allows for a high degree of customization (including how to display hyperlinks and where to start from when opening the Research Center), some of the simpler things have been overlooked. All articles are displayed in an annoyingly childish font, which, with the exception of font size, is not adjustable and is difficult to read for more than a few lines. While the media gallery and all media clips that we tried worked (and were excellent additions to the subject matter), we found that the articles themselves were often glitchy. Longer articles would not scroll, and trying to highlight text for copying and pasting crashed our machine. An additional caveat is that the online resources are not functional; the sites that it tries to send you to no longer exist or are down. Likewise, we weren't happy with the claim that the package is "the ultimate source of never-ending information"--if you continue to buy Versabooks online (although again, we couldn't find any active site related to this package). --Emilie Herbst
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