Findings
In establishing a rating system, we looked at all the CD's we had acquired, found the best parts of each and created a paradigm, in theory, what the best CD, a collection of all the best parts of everything that is available, would look like. Then we compared each of the CD's to the abstraction we created. The one that got the highest evaluation got 71.5 points; the one that got the lowest evaluation got 19. Some CD's were designed with interactive CD-ROM technology in mind. Others looked like putting them of CD was an afterthought; they took material from already published books and input the text, probably with a scanner, onto a CD.
Two CD's, these that ranked first and third, make an interesting contrast. The first, Encarta '95 was clearly designed with the maximum utility of CD-ROM technology in mind; it was produced by a software company. It earned points in every category, although it only received one out to five possible points in some areas. In the 50-point-possible category of text, however, it only pulled in 32 point. The third-ranked CD, Countries of the World, pulled in 47 points in text, but got the maximum five points in only one of the ten categories, coverage of North Korea. It got zero points in movies, maps, spoken language, samples, and sounds/music. In other words, it was not fancy--a kind of plain Jane--but loaded with information. These two represent the opposite ends of the spectrum in format; one geared to high tech, the other a hardbound book in cyberspace. Yet, both earned high rankings.
The second-ranked text, Compton's Interactive encyclopedia, was much like the first-ranked, as was the fourth-ranked, Grolier's Multimedia Encyclopedia. Two CD's focused on Asia, the fifth-ranked, Asia Alive, and the seventeenth (last), Astonishing Asia; the latter had five movies. Asia Alive also had some text and other features; Astonishing Asia had no text, only movies. These are examples of the wide range of options available to the CD-ROM user.
One factor speaks through clearly, Asian countries generally, were treated at a level lower than that where they should be. For example, in counting the reference for all countries on Grolier's Multimedia Encyclopedia, the countries with the lowest number were Thailand (88), Hong Kong (75), Taiwan (95), and Korea (145). All other countries had numbers greater than Belgium (234), with the United States (4493) as the highest. Indeed, most of the CD's gave a disproportionate amount of coverage to the United States, but given that they were most published in the United States, and used in the United States, that is understandable. In coverage of other countries, there tends to be a Western European bias in the production of many of the CD's.
The alternative that a few of the CD's adopted, was to treat all countries exactly equal, regardless of size, or importance. They established a set of criteria and filled in the gaps, filling the pigeon holes, filling in the blanks on a table. Since data was present equally or uniformly on such CD's, we did not fill in the blanks for each of the categories. In the comments at the bottom, we noted that these CD's treated each country uniformly. In these cases, we indicated that each country had the same treatment by an asterisk, rather than a number. If there was no coverage, we indicated such by a zero.