The Britannica 2008 DVD is nothing if not thorough. To throw some of the obligatory back-of-the-box statistics at you, there are over a hundred thousand articles on the disc, backed up by a wealth of multimedia including some 20,000 images and almost a thousand audio and video clips. As with previous versions, the program is split into three sections: the main encyclopaedia, a student library (targeted at ten- to fourteen-year-olds) and a children's library for those under ten.

The main “adult” encyclopaedia is very neatly presented in a crisp, tabbed, browser style, with a standard interface sporting the usual back and forward navigation arrows, bookmarks and the like. The all-important search function pops up every reference to a search string in windows to the left of the main display, highlighting relevant text articles and multimedia material in separate windows.

As you would expect, there's a whole load of cross-referencing between articles and links to online content, along with a feature called the “brainstormer” that allows you to further explore the connections between articles. This is basically a visual tree that lets the user jump from link to link: Oliver Cromwell leads to The New Model Army, which leads to the Roundheads and so forth.

In terms of organisation, the encyclopaedia is impressively designed, with useful extra touches like being able to pin notes on articles (done simply via a right click menu). An explorer menu categorises the encyclopaedia's content in sections such as video clips, or audio clips of classical music. Themed time-lines (such as “art” and “ecology”) also allow the user to explore various topics in date form.

Newly added for the 2008 edition is one final organisational tool; the workspace. This lets you set up a project screen upon which any related articles, images and video can be saved, so you can browse through everything from one central hub. The Britannica reference suite also contains a full dictionary and thesaurus (these are the excellent Merriam-Webster's), plus a reasonably detailed world atlas.

Finally, we have the student and elementary children's encyclopaedias. These are a clever idea, built similarly to the main program but with the addition of a useful homework helper that contains educational games and activities, study guides, advice on writing projects and so forth. However, they suffer a little in that the UK localisation isn't as good as with the main encyclopaedia, and the American slant can be off-putting at times.

Britannica 2008 Ultimate is a highly organised and well presented reference suite with a staggering amount of content ensconced on its DVD, backed up by a goodly amount of Web links. The articles are written to a high standard, and despite some slight localisation issues in the student sections, this is an excellent value for money package.