Advertisements for 'Encyclopedia Salesmen Wanted' used to be a familiar site on Situations Vacant pages. Conjuring up images of trench-coated men wearing brown polyester slacks trudging wearily from door to door, weighed down by whole collections of gilt-embossed tomes and sad reflections on life.

Luckily for us, today's encyclopedia come in more manageable sizes and minus the desperate sales pitch. Britannica, Encarta and Compton's make for handy reference tools for use in the home, either with the kids' homework or simply for browsing pleasure.

Although Britannica recently put its entire contents on the Web for free access, their Web server has proven to be a little erratic. Until they can stop it from crashing so frequently, and also because the CD is a handy reference to have in any household, the Britannica encyclopedia is worth including in this review.

In the past, computerised encyclopedia tended to go light on content and long on frill of the multimedia variety. Not so anymore. The new Microsoft Encarta Reference Suite 2000, for Microsoft Corp. claims to contain over 40 million words and 52,000 separate entries.

The Encyclopedia Britannica CD 99 Multimedia Edition, from Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., up the ante with 73,000 entries. Close behind these two is Compton's Encyclopedia 2000 Deluxe, from Learning Co. Inc, which claims to have 40,000 articles.

Encarta, well ahead in the multimedia stakes, comes with Interactive World Atlas as well as the World English Dictionary. Britannica comes with the 1998 Britannica Book of the Year, and the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary although it doesn't have the images to match Encarta. Compton's includes two-year's worth of National Geographic magazine, the Handy Science Answer Book and a number of 360-degree panoramic views of various locations.

For sheer depth of content Britannica comes out way ahead, it has the most straightforward approach and displays mouse-clickable links at the end of articles for Internet access. It does require 450 megabytes of material on your hard drive from one single CD.

If you're on a tight budget, Compton's is a worthy purchase, it has a friendly look and feel with two search fields to fill in and a drop-down list that determines how the fields combine.

Encarta works best as an aid to learning. It combines the first newly-written dictionary in 30 years, including previously unused words like 'fatwa' which have only recently come into English usage. Encarta has a wealth of images, animations, panoramic virtual tours and video sound clips as well as elegantly designed window layouts and a favourites menu that allows you to create shortcuts to your often-used articles.

Whichever one you decide to add to your computerised household, they all offer a fun way to gain knowledge.

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