Most useful to writers and all those interested in getting at the Bartlett's text in new ways are the flexible searching capabilities offered on the CD-ROM version. No longer are we limited to thumbing through the print index in search of the one entry that most nearly matches the subject we're after. A search for just the right quotation can begin in any number of ways. You can approach the data by topic, choosing from among nine broad subject categories, each with a handful of subcategories. You can, for example, drill in through "Emotions and Character" to "Friendship," to find a list of several dozen authors and what they had to say on the subject.
A keyword search lets you step outside the bounds of the broad topic categories provided and construct your own custom search. Pursuing the word shoes, for instance, turns up 13 entries from an interesting variety of writers, including Ann Sexton, William Shakespeare, and Carl Perkins. Browsing the keyword search is fun-sort of like reaching into the rushing stream of literature, philosophy, and history and pulling out all sorts of surprising fauna. In less then five minutes' time with the keyword search, I had netted such charming and unanticipatable exotica as dingledodies (Jack Kerouac), Sesquipedalia (Horace), and Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo (Edward Lear).
Searches can also be limited by author, by media (video, sound, pictures), by source (all the quotes, say, from Macbeth or Lolita), by date, nationality, and geography. These kinds of never-before-available search strategies are the very best reasons for adding Bartlett's Expanded Multimedia Edition to your collection, particularly if you're a writer. They open up the data in new and helpful ways-in ways limited only by the imagination of the user.
For most writers, the multimedia elements of this product will prove less useful than the ample search tools. Tom Hine, the editor of the multimedia section of Bartlett's says in his preface, "The capabilities of the CD-ROM spurred us to identify a whole new class of quotations that consist of images, music and movement. They are included because we believe them to be familiar reference points in contemporary culture." To that end, we have a slew of images and sounds on the disc that, it is true, are familiar, but that seem somehow beside the point of Bartlett's. A clip from Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag," a reproduction of the once ubiquitous yellow Smiley Face, and a video newsclip of O.J.'s famous Bronco ride-to name but three of the hundreds of multimedia elements on this product-may be fun to poke around with, but they are ultimately of little use, particular for those readers whom I imagine make up the bulk of the Bartlett's audience, writers and speakers.
Mark Garvey is a writer and editor living in Cincinnati, Oh.
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