Microsoft Encarta Reference Library Premium 2005 DVD | 
 enlarge | From: Microsoft
Category: Software
List Price: $74.95
Buy New: $17.50
You Save: $57.45 (77%)
New (2) Used (6) from $17.42
Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 4680
Format: Dvd-rom
Platforms: Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows Xp
Media: DVD-ROM
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Operating System: Windows XP
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
MPN: 84400783
UPC: 805529833777
EAN: 0805529833777
ASIN: B00027TJCG
Release Date: June 28, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: New as packaged in original clamshell case. Satisfaction guaranteed
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| Features:
| • | Complete learning resource for home or school use | | • | Multimedia encyclopedia and feature-rich reference tools | | • | Explore science, history, cultures, geography, art, and more | | • | Encarta dictionary, thesaurus, and translation dictionaries | | • | Designed for students as young as 7 years old |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
This reference tool offers comprehensive homework and research tools with dictionary and thesaurus, literature guides, homework starters, interactive world atlas, dynamic timelines, chart maker, and more. Also included is Microsoft's Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2005 software. A wealth of knowledge in one box!
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 MS Encarta Reference Library Premium 2005 DVD August 24, 2005
Miss MLS (Indianapolis)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is a great program! Super for use at home no matter what age you are!
Battle of the Titans - Encarta vs. the Britannica March 15, 2005
Sam Vaknin (Skopje, Macedonia)
21 out of 22 found this review helpful
The Encarta Encyclopedia - and even more so, the Encarta Reference Library Premium 2005 - is an impressive reference library. It caters effectively (and, at $70, cheaply) to the educational needs of everyone in the family, from children as young as 7 or 8 years old to adults who seek concise answers to their queries. It is fun-filled, interactive, colorful, replete with tens of thousands of images, video clips, and audio snippets.
The Encarta is extremely user-friendly, with its search bar and novel Visual Browser. It comes equipped with a dictionary, thesaurus, chart maker, searchable index of quotations, games, and an Encarta Kids interface. Installation is easy. The Encarta is augmented by weekly or bi-weekly updates and the feature-rich online MSN Encarta Premium with its Homework Help offerings.
The Encyclopedia Britannica (established in 1768) sports Student and Elementary versions of its venerable flagship product - but it is far better geared to tackle the information needs of adults and, even more so, professionals. Its 100,000 articles are long and deep, supported by impressive bibliographies, and written by the best scholars in their respective fields.
The Britannica, too, come bundled with an atlas (less detailed than the Encarta's), dictionary, thesaurus, classic articles from previous editions, an Interactive Timeline, a Research Organizer, and a Knowledge Navigator (a Brain Stormer). It is as user-friendly as the Encarta. The Britannica, though, is updated only 2-4 times a year, a serious drawback, only partially compensated for by 3 months of free access to the its unequalled powerhouse online Web site.
It seems that the Britannica and the Encarta cater to different market segments and that the Britannica provides more in-depth coverage of its topics while the Encarta is a more complete, PC-orientated reference experience. The market positioning of the Britannica's Elementary and Student Encyclopedias is, therefore, problematic. Encarta has an all-pervasive hold on and ubiquitous penetration of the child-to-young adult markets.
Both encyclopedias offer an embarrassment of riches. Users of both find the wealth and breadth of information daunting and data mining is fast becoming an art form. Encarta introduced the Visual (Virtual) Browser and Britannica incorporated the Brain Stormer to cope with this predicament. But few know how to deploy them effectively.
Encarta actively encourages fun-filled browsing and Britannica fully supports serious research. These preferences are reflected in the design of the two products. The Encarta is a riot of colors, sidebars, videos, audio clips, photos, embedded links, literature, Web resources, and quizzes. It is a product of the age of mass communication, a desktop extension of television and the Internet.
The Britannica is a sober assemblage of first-rate texts, up to date bibliographies, and minimal multimedia. It is a desktop university library: thorough, well-researched, comprehensive, trustworthy.
Indeed, the Encarta and the Britannica offer competing models for interacting with the Internet. Both provide content updates - the Encarta weekly or bi-weekly and the Britannica 2-4 times a year. Both offer additional and timely content and revisions on dedicated Web sites. But the Encarta conditions some of its functions - notably its research tools and updates - on registration with its Plus Club. The Britannica doesn't.
The Encarta incorporates numerous third-party texts and visuals (including dozens of Discovery Channel videos, hundreds of newspaper articles, and a plethora of Scientific American features). The Encarta's multimedia offerings are also impressive with thousands of video and audio clips, maps, tables, and animations. The Britannica provides considerably more text - though it has noticeably enhanced it non-textual content over the year (the 1994-7 editions had nothing or very little but text).
Both reference products would do well to integrate with new desktop search tools from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. A seamless experience is in the cards. Users must and will be able to ferret content from all over - their desktop, their encyclopedias, and the Web - using a single, intuitive interface.
The new Encarta Search Bar, which was integrated into the product this past year, enables users to search any part of the Encarta application (encyclopedia, dictionary, thesaurus, etc) without having the application open. Definitely a step in the right direction.
Having used both products extensively in the last few months, I found myself entertaining some minor gripes:
The Encarta offers 3-D tours which gobble up computer resources and are essentially non-interactive a limited. Is it worth the investment and the risk to the stability and performance of the user's computer?
The editorial process is not transparent. It is not clear how both products cope with contemporary and recent developments, minority-sensitive issues, and controversial topics (such as abortion and gay rights).
The Encarta tries to cater to the needs of challenged users, such as the visually-impaired - but is still far from doing a good job of it. The Britannica doesn't even bother.
The atlas, dictionary, and thesaurus incorporated in both products are surprisingly outdated. Why not use a more current - and dynamically updated - offering? What about dictionaries for specialty terms (medical or computer glossaries, for instance)? The Encarta's New English Dictionary dropped a glossary of computer terms it used to include back in 2001. All's the pity.
Both encyclopedias consume (not to say) hog computer resource far in excess of the official specifications. This makes them less suitable for installation on older PCs and on many laptops. Despite the hype, relatively few users possess DVD drives (but those who do find, in both products, the entire encyclopedia available on one DVD).
But that's it. Don't think twice. Run to the closest retail outlet (or surf the relevant Web sites) and purchase both products now. Combined, these reference suites offer the best value for money around and significantly enhance you access to knowledge and wisdom accumulated over centuries all over the world. Sam Vaknin, author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"
Fun to use, great for kids, worth the money March 6, 2005
dthurney (San Antonio, TX USA)
18 out of 19 found this review helpful
I had several free versions of encylopedias loaded. They were generally abbreviated and becoming out of date, Encarta 2002 for example. But they were really the best kid friendly research tool out there and my kids actually used these encyclopedias on a regular basis, so I decided to upgrade.
Likes:
Love the new search bar in my desktop tray and the fact that I can search the dictionary or the thesaurus or the encyclopedia without hunting for each application's icon. Love that I can run it from my hard drive without searching for the DVD.
The interactive pictures such as 360 degree views and virtual tours are done well and you can just go through those types of files if you want to see them all without having to wade into specific topics. And the kids like the extra visual browser index rather than the standard text index (which can still be used.)The links to external web sites for more information are very useful.
Dislikes:
The install was painful. Although I have all of the latest Windows updates, the load process took a long while only to error out repeatedly. I finally learned that my Ad-watch spyware blocker was interfering and was able to get past the MICROSOFT.MSXML2,publickeyToken= ...etc. error message that Microsoft has yet to post on their site. Alternatively, it would be nice to be warned of possible conflicts before beginning or have the process handle conflicts in a more friendly fashion.
The update process was also overly complicated as well. And after finally getting it to work I was disappointed to learn that included updates end in October regardless of when you purchase the product.
And as neat as some of the interactive pictures are - sometimes I just need to print an embedded image or some simple text to take with me - wish that was easier.
Conclusion:
Very satisfied and I finally feel that I have found some software that does something useful and gives my computer a purpose beyond running all the software I need just to keep my computer protected. If you have kids 8 and up - and don't already have a full version of an encyclopedia - go for it!
Good stuff December 7, 2004
Daniel Romero (california)
4 out of 10 found this review helpful
This is an awesome program. They have virtual tours of places most people will never see and excellent info on just about everything.
 Updates cannot be continued.... PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE November 13, 2004
Phnom (Washington, DC USA)
49 out of 54 found this review helpful
My real complaint with this fresh, good encyclopedia [my version was that for 2004] is that after "31 October" the "free content updates" stop. I had assumed that after that point I could subscribe to monthly updates at what I thought would be a modest annual fee. But the fact is that when the updates stop, often a few months after you buy the Encarta, you must purchase a whole new Encarta at full price and "toss" or rather delete the old Encarta. And the new Encarta runs out in another year. Then another full purchase, and then another. At a going and and rising price of say $70 for the DVD, that is a high cost over time for an encyclopdiea that has little of the real depth of a hard-copy Britannica or other established book-format encyclopedias. The whole benefit of the internet is that things can be updated (and, yes, for a reasonable annual fee), but Encarta provides us with throwaway "computer books" purely to get top dollar out of us once a year, or so it seems. Even the old Encyclopedia Britannica books provided a rudimentary update, for a much smaller fee than full re-purchase, of annual yearbooks. I'll be checking around to see what the DVD Britannica's update policy is (perhaps similar, perhaps not). In any case, I'm unhappy with the planned obsolescence of the Encarta encyclopedias, unhappy that such obsolescene was not made explicit from the start on the box (others I know had assumed there would be some system for continuing updates beyond "31 October"; when Encarta says updates will be "free" until that date, I think one is justified in assuming that they won't be free after, but that then you must begin to pay. The wording does not suggest that the updates will stop completely.) This situation will probably send me (and others) back to my old research tool---Google, which keeps on coming updated even as I type these lines. I had recommended this encyclopedia to many students and a few friends: I will no longer recommend it without full disclosure of the update policy. Until this month I had been one of Encarta's real fans and I bet I've "sold" a bunch of copies for them. Now I'll get in the habit of doing my research elsewhere. (Also, Encarta does not really encourage feedback on such matters. They give a mailing address for stamped letter, but do not provide any on-line or either tolled or toll-free telephone access to anyone who might want to bring up such a complaint. Surely they understand that this is no longer a letter-writing world, and that makes their customer service job easier for them, and less satisfactory for customers.)
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