A few hundred articles undoubtedly mention sovereignty only in passing, but there is quite a number of articles that human indexing did not pick up, or the limits of the print edition could not accommodate in the Index, such as the one about Protestantism that discusses the sovereignty of God, and the double predestination. These cannot be located in the print format. If a term the patron has in mind, such as political persecution, is not a selected index entry or at least a cross reference, such as Ceylon see Sri Lanka there is no way to find the articles in which the term appears.

Digital versions

Only computer-readable versions can offer access to the entire body of text (and many of the images) of Encyclopaedia Britannica. The efforts in the early 1990s for a computerized version were half-hearted and insufficient. The Britannica Electronic Index arranged the index terms topically rather than alphabetically, but still required the patrons to get each of the volumes and to look up the articles. It was limited to index terms and see references chosen by specialists. The first CD-ROM version of Britannica was also a disappointment as the software left much to be desired in every regard, from searching to sorting the results. Britannica CD '97 published in 1996 was the first very successful digital edition at the quite affordable price of $150. The follow-up version sported even better features, and was sold for between $99-$119. The 1999 versions (a single volume and a two-disk version) that differ mostly in multimedia content hit the stores in October at an even better price.

The first online version was limited to subscribers of the Lexis-Nexis online services, certainly not accessible to the public. Britannica Online was made available first for libraries then to individual subscribers in the Spring of 1996, and it has been constantly enhanced. This review reflects its status as of Mid-October, 1998. The editors of Britannica Online allowed this reviewer to take a sneak preview of the pre-beta version of the 1999 edition that will be released in the first quarter of 1999. This review will be also updated. Some essential changes will be mentioned here, too.

The Content of Britannica Online

Britannica Online has all the textual content of all the print volumes and then some. One of the many advantages of converting structured data like Encyclopaedia Britannica into a computer-readable format is the ability to present it in a variety of shapes and forms, as if to look at it from different angles. Britannica Online is not bound by the glue of the printed version and the limits of printed volumes. If you wish, all of its components (Propaedia, Macropaedia, Micropaedia, the Yearbooks) appear as a single unit that can be searched at once - except the Index. When you type in a query (for example, sovereignty) and click on the radio button next to the Article label (Figure 1), the search engine looks for the words in an a list generated from all the articles in the four components and reports the number of items that include your search term (Figure 2).

Figure 1: Single word Article query	Figure 2: Response to the Article query

This computer generated list is far more extensive than the printed Index created by humans. It contains far more index terms than the printed Index volumes, and grows every time as new articles are added that may contain words and names that did not occur before in any of the articles. The most recent printed Index is static until the new edition is issued, and the Yearbooks include their own index terms in each volumes.

There is a separate online version of the printed Index within Britannica Online that includes also only terms assigned by the editors and human indexers of the encyclopedia. Its advantage over the printed version is that it includes index terms also from all the yearbooks. It allows restricting the search to the core articles that deal with the topic selected (Figure 3). It is both searchable and alphabetically browsable.

This aggregation approach is complemented by a flexible segregation approach that goes beyond the separation of the printed volumes in many regards (Figure 4). The Propaedia (as Spectrum), the Macropaedia (as Knowledge in Depth), the Micropaedia and Yearbooks (under Article) are also available for alphabetical browsing as separate units along with many subsets of the encyclopedia. These subsets are formed from articles about persons (Biographies), geographic regions, continents and cities (Geography), and countries (Nations of the World). There are also separate collections of articles with photos, drawings, maps and flags (Illustrations), audio, video and animation elements (Multimedia), and pointers to Internet sites (Internet Links). Actually, the segregated approach is a bit overdone and has become very redundant and potentially confusing. The Illustrations and the Illustrated Articles subsets are hardly distinguishable for the casual user. The former has 7,000, the latter has 5,000 entries. The difference between the two is that the Illustrations subset has an entry for the caption of each photos, drawings, maps and flags. If an article has 5 images all of the captions appear in the Illustrations subset, but only the article itself appears in the other subset (Figure 6).

Figure 3: Response to the Index query	Figure 4: Segregated components of Britannica Online

Figure 5: List of all the illustrations	Figure 6: List of articles with one or more illustrations

Articles that appear in the Nations of the World subset also appear in the Illustrations and Illustrated Articles subsets, and many also in one or two other subsets. From the pre-beta version of the 1999 version it seems that it will consolidate/merge some of these subsets, and remove the Propaedia component.

Browsing these subsets is useful, but it would be better to use checkboxes near to the query cell for limiting the domain of a search. to -say- geographic entries, articles about countries, Micropaedia, Macropaedia, Propaedia or Index entries, and to articles that have photos, drawings, maps, flags, audio, video and/or animation elements. This is shown on a mockup screen that I made up for illustration (Figure 7).

Figure 7: Author's proposed template for filtered browsing/searching	Figure 8: Components not included in the print edition (Dictionary, Internet Links, Britannica Classics)

Extra sources in Britannica Online

Beyond the slicing and dicing of the traditional content, there are also components that have not been part of the print edition (Figure 8). The Dictionary is the 10th edition of the excellent Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. It is both browsable (by the lead term of the dictionary entry headers) and searchable (by any word in the entry headers). It would be more useful if the definitions could be also searched rather than just the entry headers. The Internet-savvy users would, of course, know that such a version is available at http://www.m-w.com.

Also extras are articles in the traditional components that have not made it to the printed Yearbooks, let alone to the Micropaedia or Macropaedia. Information related to current events are readily available in Britannica Online because there is no deadline for inclusion as for the printed Yearbooks. As I was working on this piece, the day after Kurosawa, the renowned film director passed away, his biography was updated online. The same was true for Alabama's former governor George Wallace.

There are components that would please also the non-researcher (Figure 9). The Week in Review section provides background information for current events, news and for anniversaries. The Spotlight section changes monthly, and provides first class multimedia and textual medleys as background for noble and popular topics alike such as the Black History Guide and the Invasion of Normandy on the occasion of the blockbuster movie, Saving Private Ryan. From the Britannica's Lives section one can find who are the famous persons (who made it to Britannica) born on a given day or date range (for those who would want to find all the Pisces or Gemini).

There is a component, eBLAST, that is not derived from the encyclopedia (although it contains many references to its articles). It is a World Wide Web directory and search engine of eminent sites selected by an editorial staff. It also stands out from the crowd of many Internet subject guides, directories and web search engines by its excellent categorization and classification and good rating of sites (Figure 10). [Editor's note: eBLAST categorizes this site, Chorus, under Arts and Literature / Literature / Education and Training / Writing and gives it three stars (excellent); see http://www.eblast.com/browse.html?HeadingUid=19008&OPath=2:611:19006.]

Figure 9: Components for the encyclopedia-shy users	Figure 10: eBLAST: Internet Subject Guide (formerly known as BIG - Britannica Internet Guide)

This single website can provide more high-quality information than hundreds of referral websites together. While content is king, it is also crucial how the content can be browsed and searched, and how the results can be sorted and displayed.

Searching Britannica Online

All the traditional components, and the digital subsets can be browsed. Some of them can be browsed alphabetically, such as the Macropaedia (Knowledge in Depth), the Index, or the Article database, or the subsets of articles that have illustrations or multimedia elements. Others are browsable by classified topics, such as Spectrum (Propaedia) or the Britannica Book of the Year. Browsing is appropriate for scanning the titles and section titles of possibly relevant articles, or to zero in on a topic from within the broader context. On the other hand, searching is the best approach when looking for a highly specific topic that does not appear as an entry term or cross reference in the Index and the user does not know where to approach the topic, or is fishing for any articles that mention a topic such as fusional languages. It is also appropriate for finding articles in various branches of knowledge, such as mythology in art and mythology in religion.