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Though I'm not a librarian, here's a review:
 
The full title is "The Complete National Geographic: 108 Years of National
Geographic Magazine on CD-ROM". It includes full scans of every single page
and every cover from the magazine going back to the very first edition. It
does not include the wallmap supplements or the occasional sound supplements,
though they do throw in a free copy of the most recent printing of their
standard wall map "The World: Political". An index to every issue is included
on each CD of the 30 CD set so you don't have to swap CDs to do searches.
Unfortunately, at this time, the searching is by keyword only. I would expect
a future version to include full text searching (not possible at this time
since the text is scanned). The keywords are a little idiosyncratic so it pays
to pick a very broad keyword and then just browse the list of matches. I've
installed both the Macintosh and Windows versions of the access software. They
function identically.
 
The quality of reproduction of the scanned pages is good but not excellent.
Photos look beautiful and seem to match the colors of the originals vividly.
Ordinary text on the pages is legible but they suffer from the "edge fuzzing"
that is often seen in compressed images of text. This leads to a certain
amount of eye-strain. The inset maps and foldouts are excellent but many of
these use a much smaller italic font for some text items. Legibility on these
is about 75%. It's a bit of an adventure --you can usually figure out what the
text says using context clues. The old advertisements that appeared in the
magazine are also reproduced with the same detail and high-quality. I've just
been reading over an advert from General Motors extolling the virtues of their
brand new diesel locomotives (replacing steam engines) from the July, 1943
issue. A few pages later, there's an ad with the headline "This army was
raised to attack!". It's an ad for milk.
 
Installation is easy but it has several pitfalls. You're offered the option of
installing the keyword database on your hard disk but there seems to be no
point in doing that --it's included on each CD and searches rapidly even on a
2X CD-ROM drive. Be forewarned: though the installation allows you to change
the default directory from C:\NGM, you can only change the drive letter. If
you change the directory name to C:\NatGeo, for example, it accepts the new
name but later crashes the program with an inscrutable error message. The
installation software also uses a cumbersome system for cataloging the number
of CDs that you have. This was clearly intended to allow customers to purchase
just a few decades, just the 1980s and 1990s maybe, instead of the full set.
The installation program refers to this as "registering" the CDs --a bad
choice of terminology considering that registering, in this installation and
most others, refers to providing customer info to the product publisher. To
register the CDs, you have to quit the installation program and then run it
again --really bizarre. Further warning: if you start with the 1990s, you'll
have to "register" each and every CD set. If you start with the 1888 CD, the
software figures out that you've got the whole set.
 
The software that permits the user to view the pages and scan through them is
primitive but functional. You have to click through a Kodak advertisement
every time the software launches (in fairness, I can live with that since it's
easy to click past it and advertising has always helped keep National
Geographic products reasonably priced). The Windows software makes a basic
error by switching some of the system colors when it launches. It's a minor
nuisance.
 
You can scroll through a list of the contents of each issue or a view of the
covers of each issue. Within the range of issues that I used to read as a kid,
the cover view is nice since I find that I often remember significant parts of
the contents once I see the cover. When you find an issue that you like, you
can open it in a low-resolution view (in which the text is not readable) and
scan rapidly through the pages. Bear in mind, flipping through pages on a
computer is still intrinsically much slower than flipping pages of a real
magazine. There is no indicator of the date of the open issue, so it's easy to
get lost.
 
When you find an article that you want to read, you click on it with a
magnifier icon. By default, this opens in a second window which is sized at
640x480 --not a great choice since most computers are now configured at higher
resolutions. In fact, I would strongly recommend running this product on a
disply set to 1024x768 on a large monitor (this is in the nature of page
reproduction --it's not the fault of the product per se). In the magnified
page view, you can click from one page to the next and pan across the page.
Maps and artwork that fold out in the original magazine are included complete.
In some respects, the scanned versions of these are even better than the
original printed version since you don't lose anything in the gutter where the
pages are bound together.
 
The key to this product is its delightful content, of course. Instead of
rummaging around in dusty stacks of old magazines, you can get that old
"National Geo feeling" with a few, admittedly somewhat cumbersone, mouse
clicks. I've already spent hours browsing with this product, and the early
issues are surprisingly interesting. For example, you can read contemporary
accounts of the creation of the Salton Sea in southern California in the
January, 1907 issue and read speculations --dismissed by the article in the
magazine-- that the new sea was affecting the weather in the southwest.
 
Should you buy it? Yes.
 
-FER