Too much to show, too little space

摘要

RATINGS SUMMARY **** 90-100 Excellent. Highly recommended. *** 80-89 Very good. Recommended. ** 70-79 Good. Well worth considering. * 60-69 Fair. Flawed but may meet certain needs. * 1-59 Poor. Inevitably, when you translate one medium to another, you can count on losing something in the translation. With luck, the gains will outweigh the losses. In the case of two CD-ROM sets offering complete runs of magazines, I've seen that workbrilliantly (Totally Mad, which I reviewed in the January 2000 Library Hi Tech News) and not quite so brilliantly (The Complete National Geographic, reviewed in the March 1998 Library Hi Tech News). Ideally, the gains--access to a complete run in a small space, the ability to track topics or authors through time, effective indexing, and the ability to look at issues that would otherwise be unavailable--outweigh lessened readability and the general clumsiness of turning pages on the screen. Sometimes the new medium just can't hack it. The CD-ROM set reviewed here is one such case. To wit, good printed maps just don't translate well to the PC--whether on CD-ROM or over the Web. Maps represent one of the extreme problems of translating print into a digital environment, as long as the digital environment uses today's real-world display devices. A good print map contains too much detailed, related information over too large a space; the PC offers too small a window into that space and undermines the effectiveness of the cartography. 1,176 INTO 143 DOESN'T GO My copy of The Complete National Geographic includes their 1994 World Map, each side of which has a 28"X42" print area (excluding margins). That's 1,176 square inches per side. Many National Geographic maps are larger; some are smaller, but almost always at least 800 square inches.