From Booklist
This review is of the Mac version. Fears about working in a non-IBM environment lasted maybe 60 seconds--the amount of time it took to load, double click, and begin using the program. Once the double click of the mouse is mastered, even the instruction booklet is barely needed to plunge right in and retrieve information, the program is that simple to use.
A tool bar at the top of the screen provides quick access to important functions: New Search, Custom Search, Graphics, Prior Step, Print, Information, and Exit. New Search displays the main index window. Custom Search provides a window to implement a Boolean search (AND, OR, NOT commands to be clicked on and off) by education, industries, and occupation. Terms may be entered by clicking on the desired word in the list provided or by typing in a word. A search asking for careers that require a bachelor's degree (education) in broadcasting (industries) with a professional slant (occupation) led to actors, cartoonists and animators, meteorologists, musicians, radio and TV announcers and newscasters, reporters and correspondents, and writers. The Graphics button provides color bar graphs of the fastest-growing occupations requiring a high-school diploma or less, requiring a four-year degree, requiring some training beyond high school, and those requiring the largest number of new people. Prior Step goes back a window at a time. Information provides a brief overview of the program.
The main index offers five ways to explore: job title, industry profile, occupational category, personal interests, and school subjects. Job title leads to an alphabetic browser of titles. Once a job title is selected, a window with a split screen appears. To the left is a list of information categories from which to choose: definition, history, requirements, opportunities for experience, methods of entering, advancement, employment outlook, earnings, conditions of work, requesting information by mail, and related careers. To the right, the text of that part of the entry appears. Unfortunately, the text is somewhat squeezed due to the limits of half a window. The industry-profile index leads to a similar setup with such choices as industry structure, careers, education, outlook, and related articles. The occupational category leads to a menu featuring categories ranging from agricultural, forestry, and conservation to services occupations. A selection from this menu then leads to a list of careers in that category. Personal interests leads to lists of careers based upon interests in, for example, airplanes, drawing, or plants. School subjects reads like a master schedule. Next to each subject is the number of related careers. Religion is low with only 6; anthropology has 12; education, 66; art, 93; and English, a whopping 340. The wait for the English-related careers to be listed seemed long but was actually quite fast when the length of the list is considered. With any of these last four entry points into the database, once a career is identified, the appropriate split screen pops up.
Its ease of use, general layout, and customized searchs clearly recommend this CD-ROM program to secondary-school and public libraries with heavy demands for career information. As with any CD-ROM program based upon an existing print source, librarians must decide whether the improved access makes purchase of the product a necessity. The ability to customize and print out career searches with this version of the encyclopedia certainly enhances patron access to information and will probably increase library usage of the print version of this classic reference work as well.
Multiple points of access are offered to the more than 117,000 quotations stored on this CD-ROM. Simple searches can be done using author/speaker name, quotation, or keyword; an extended-search feature allows searching using a number of other elements, including nationality, occupation, and birth or death year. The biographical information about the authors/speakers, when available, comes from Gale's Almanac of Famous People. It is also possible to search on the source of a quotation; for example, all quotations from the New York Times.
Both DOS and Windows versions are available on the same disc. The DOS version used for this review has a graphical user interface similar to Windows. The minimum system requirements include an IBM or compatible PC with 286 processor, DOS version 3.3 or higher, Windows 3.0 or higher (for that version), 640k bytes of RAM (520K available), hard disk with a minimum of 2.5MB of free space, and a VGA graphics card and monitor. A mouse and printer are considered optional, but actual use recommends them. The instructions for installation are clearly written, and the process itself is fairly straightforward. The accompaning manual is not indexed and is therefore not very helpful. There are context-sensitive help screens.
One of the advantages of this format is that information unused when searching conventional author-keyword indexes can now be used to perform an extended search. One can search for "quotations on death by a Russian author" or "quotations by teachers" with some success. Searching prince as an occupation, English as a nationality, and architecture as a keyword yielded Prince Charles' infamous remarks about modern architecture. One access point missing from the extended-search function is the sex of the author/speaker. Such a feature would save the time it takes to consult the several collections of quotations by women that are needed to supplement the standard quotation sources. There are many quotations from contemporary figures: Maya Angelou (59 quotations), Tom Stoppard (21), Chinua Achebe (11), and Margaret Atwood (4).
The use of a mouse speeds up the actual searching process, as using keyboard arrows and combinations (e.g., ALT-M) is a bit cumbersome. Screen design and layouts are visually appealing, if not colorful. Although a printer is considered optional equipment, use of one saves a lot of time. This copy was "field tested" in a closed telephone-reference area, where it was quite helpful to be able to print off the requested quotation and dash back to the phone with page in hand.
In addition to identifying specific quotations, it is possible to generate custom-tailored lists of quotations using the extended-search function. This would be one feature to recommend this product for public use, especially in a setting where there is not a large collection of quotation books available.
Two of the standard print quotation dictionaries are available on diskette: The Columbia Electronic Dictionary of Quotations [RBB My 15 94] and The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations & Modern Quotations [RBB O 1 94]. Taken together, they have only about one-quarter the number of quotations as Gale's Quotations. However, they are also considerably less expensive. The Oxford English Dictionary on CD-ROM contains 2 million quotations that can be searched. However, they were chosen to illustrate the use of a word, not for their quotability. As the first stand-alone quotation collection on CD-ROM, Gale's is a good product. (The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations is available on CD-ROM as part of Microsoft Bookshelf.) The addition of access points by sex of author/speaker would make it even better.
