The Hermitage (St. Petersburg Art Treasures Tour. The World's Greatest Museum). Intersoft, in cooperation with the Hermitage Museum, 1995. Manufactured and distributed by Cascade Marketing International, 115 E. School Road, Wentachee, WA 98801, tel. 1-509-663-9523; e-mail 76400.227@compuserve.com. Windows version (Mac also available); choice of Russian or English text on the one disk.

Treasures of Russia (Introduction to Russian Art). Intersoft, In cooperation with Iskusstvo Publishers, Avangard Inc. & "Boyan" Orchestra, 1995. Same distributor and same technical specifications.

The Silk Road: Digital Journey. produced by Marek Gronowski. DNA Multimedia Corporation, 1760 West 2nd Ave. Vancouver, B.C. V6J 1H6, Canada, tel. 1-604-736-8783; e-mail: info@dna.bc.ca. Works on both Windows and Mac.

Reviewed by Daniel Waugh

Note: The two Intersoft disks require a 386SX processor or higher, single speed CD-ROM drive, 4 MB of RAM, Windows 3.1 or higher. The DNA disk requires a 486 and double-speed drive, but otherwise the same. To read the Russian on the Intersoft disks, one has to install Cyrillic fonts.

We have come a long way technically, since the first of the Intersoft CD-ROMs (on the Orthodox Church) was reviewed on these pages just a few years ago. The two more recent Intersoft disks are considerably richer and more sophisticated, but they still have not achieved the level of interactivity and substance displayed in DNA's disk on the Silk Road. Although my experience with CD-ROMs is still somewhat limited, given the rapid development of Web technology, I have to wonder whether

they have much of a future. Those which can provide a reference work of some real substance and staying power (e.g., the Oxford English Dictionary) may make the grade, as can productions such as the Corbis Corporation's guide to the National Gallery in London. Alas, not everyone has such deep pockets as Bill Gates and Corbis. For teaching purposes, a disk such as that on the Silk Road, with many oppurtunities for exploring multiple paths to additional information and some interactive features, may do a very good job for some school classrooms. I am not quite sure whether the Intersoft products fit anywhere on this spectrum.

Both The Hermitage and Treasures feature a good, detailed help file to get the user started; installation and use are quite straightforward. They have similarly designed displays and operate in similar fashion. Probably the least valuable part of each disk is its set of impressionistic video tours, accompanied by somewhat shmaltzy music and with no voiceover so that the viewer can identify the objects. Pretty pictures, and little more, alas, and no attempt to explain and integrate the music with images to broaden an understanding of the culture. For the Hermitage, there are also several narrated tours, focussing more on the building and its history than on the art works. These do give an excellent sense of the magnificence of the Winter Palace. The art in Hermitage is organized by world areas and periods; even though there are more than 300 images, the selection barely scratches the surface. Convenient chronological tables enable one to place the art works on a time line and thus see the relative position of one vis-a-vis several others. For each work, there is a short paragraph of explanatory text, and the user can access the material through various indexes. A map of archaeological sites is useful for the matching of the examples of "Scythian Gold" with the location of the finds-click on a location,

and the image of the object appears. For someone planning to visit the Hermitage, the disk might serve as a nice introduction, but I hardly find enough here to be of use either in the classroom or for reference purposes.

Treasures has similar features, with the art arranged by periods and accessible through chronological tables and indexing of artists and titles. There are schematic maps of the various periods, where one can click on icons of the locations for which there are objects. Hence, one can bring up a Moscow Kremlin church from the late 15th century or the Church of the Intercession on the Moat (commonly known as St. Basil's) in Red Square from the 16th century. In general, perhaps because of the more focussed nature of the subject, Treasures has a much more satisfying selection than does Hermitage. For the pictures alone, Treasures might be a useful reserve supplement to an introductory survey of Russian culture. Both disks allow enlarging the pictures to look at details; and the colors can be adjusted, if necessary. Picture quality is good. It is possible that both disks would be of some use too in Russian language courses to expand the range of readings and listening exercises.

The major disappointment of these disks is in the accompanying text. There is simply too little substance. True, if a particular ruler or artist is mentioned, there is a hypertext link to some short biographical information. If an artist moved in a certain circle, often some of his teachers or collaborators are mentioned and can be examined. Several major works are listed for each artist, and those which are also represented on the disc can then be readily accessed. There are hypertext links to definitions of key terms. But the commentary is largely platitudes, and there is practically no effort to relate each item to a broader cultural context. Thus, we never learn of the possible comparison of the paintings of Fedotov with those of Hogarth, and we cannot get an inkling of the thematic analogies with the stories by Gogol'. How any of this relates to the important intellectual movements in the nineteenth century is beyond the scope of the authors of these disks. Furthermore, the works representing artists do not always highlight what the text tells us about them. Goncharova becomes an exponent of "rayonnism," but there are none of her works that would illustrate this and there is never any clear explanation of her "primitivism" (for example, in its relationship to icon painting). It would be difficult for an uninformed reader to get much sense of why someone like Tsar Ivan IV or Tsar Peter I was important, and not unexpectedly, obsolete textbookish cliches, such as the idea that the "Stand on the Ugra" in 1480 ended the power of "The Golden Horde," are common here.

In contrast, since it has been designed with pedagogical goals in mind, The Silk Road is an excellent resource for a range of class levels. It is sophisticated enough so that it could be used even for a college class, although it is probably intended for middle or high school students. There are numerous good photographs, music clips, samples of phrases in various languages, maps with animated drawings of routes and directions of influence and more. The explanations of major religions and ethnic groups are sound and pack a lot in a short space; one can learn quite a bit about history and exploration. The publisher even offers an internet site where one can access related materials of rather limited scope (the idea is promising).

Main selections are done at "The Market," where for the basic journey, one can begin with a slide show and accompanying commentary following the route from Xian in China to Rawalpindi in Pakistan. There are occasional glitches, where comment does not match image. Marco Polo is erroneously placed in the 12th century; a mention of K-2 is accompanied by a photo of Rakaposhi; the importance of the recent ethnic changes in Xinjiang is obscured by a misleading comment about Chinese being a small minority in Kashgar. The slide show would have been better had more historical information been incorporated into it.

For history, one searches under a separate rubric, and the information is rather fragmented. The timelines are pretty sketchy too, but enough material is provided so that a user could pull together a reasonably clear historical sequence of important events. At many points one can click on hypertext connections to learn about important individuals; the

interactive maps allow the user to select two countries or regions and bring up immediately a listing of products that went between them.

There are various quiz questions for review along the way, and at "the university" one can attempt to pass tests in five main categories of knowledge in order to obtain the key to the Cave of Knowledge. There no pot of gold awaits; the message presumably is that the reward is what one learned to gain admittance.

There is one unfortunate bias in the coverage of the disk-only the eastern half of the Silk Road is represented; very little intimates about its extension the rest of the way west to the Mediterranean world. Even within the region covered, there is too little sense of the complexity and multiplicity of routes. To follow it south along the modern Karakoram Highway into Pakistan, for example, obscures the fact that this particular route was never the most important one to the sub-continent until modern times. Perhaps the limitation was imposed by the amount of information that could be compressed on the one disk; a complementary one for the western half of the Silk Road would be in order.

Overall I come away from these disks dismayed by what I would call the "news magazine" or "sound-byte" approach to information. The same thing is true of such CD-ROM reference works as Microsoft's Encarta, which does not always compare favorably with the old-fashioned printed World Book Encyclopedia (aimed at 5th-grade reading level, mind you). Granted, the World Atlas that accompanies Encarta is substantially better than the basic encyclopedia, and gradually, with the addition of more sound clips that allow a user to hear languages or musical instruments, the CD-ROM does begin to achieve its potential to do what a print volume could not. I would hate to think that distilling substance into short cliche-ridden paragraphs is the wave of the future though, and any amount of hypertext connection is no substitute for significant content, if all the links lead to equally shallow summaries. What I really would like from these disks is the opportunity for users of different levels of interest to delve into a topic in some depth. What we find instead though, at least in the Intersoft products, is water of uniform depth, coming up to about the ankles. Even if the disks had as their result to encourage one to go to the library and take out a good book, they would be doing their job, but I am not persuaded they will provide such an incentive.

Daniel Waugh, Associate Professor in History and JSIS at the University of Washington, is a specialist in Russian and Central Asian History.