THE PRIDE OF GEOGRAPHIC DO YOU HAVE A CORNER OF your house or apartment piled high with back issues of National Geographic you can't bear to throw away? A couple of new software packages from the venerable magazine may be worth considering. One of these is a single computer CD with 3,000 photographs from the magazine ($30 in stores or $35 from www.nationalgeographic.com). The photos are among the best that have appeared in the magazine's history. You can browse or watch a slide show of the work of selected National Geographic photographers as they talk about their work. The selling point for the CD, however, is the ability to clip and paste the photographs into newsletters or greeting cards. For this reason, the collection is heavy on placid landscapes and cute animals and children. The most impressive offering is a set of 30 CDs with 108 years of the magazine ($150 in stores), starting with the first issue in 1888. Those early issues are largely curiosities--academic versions of today's colorful magazine written with the average reader in mind. The best part of the package is a highly efficient search engine that will warm the heart of a student desperate to turn out a report on, say, volcanoes. Simply plug in the word, and you get a lengthy list of articles explaining how volcanoes function and providing contemporary accounts of some of the more spectacular eruptions of the past century. Alas, the stories are not as legible as they should be. Apparently because the articles are graphics files, the type is gray and fuzzy. It's a failing that blights both the computer images and the versions you can print out. So don't winnow out those yellow stacks just yet. RELATED ITEMS SCREEN: National Geographic CD-ROM Return to top of story

Updated Oct. 30, 1997 by bwwebmaster
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