Savor Lithuanian history at your home PC

  • 2000-02-17
  • By Darius James Ross
VILNIUS – The Vilnius-based electronic publishing house Elektronines Leidybos Namai has recently released its latest historical multimedia CD-ROM entitled "Lietuva iki Mindaugo"(Lithuania before Mindaugas). The disc allows the user to choose from the Lithuanian, Polish, Russian and English languages.

In existence since 1998, the company is an offshoot of an earlier company called Ethnomedia which produced the first-ever CD-ROM about Lithuanian history.

"Lietuva iki Mindaugo" represents three years of research by a team of anthropologists who gathered scholarly articles, photos and maps about Lithuanian prehistory from its primeval beginnings to the coronation of Lithuania's first king, Mindaugas, in the early 13th century. Mindaugas unified the quarrelsome Lithuanian tribes with an iron fist; his reign saw the emergence of a Lithuanian proto-nation and is a good dividing line between the country's history and prehistory.

This CD-ROM contains the equivalent of 500 printed pages of information in addition to roughly 1,000 maps and photos as well as 34 'Quicktime' videos and animations. CD-ROM discs use optical technology utilizing microscopic laser-bored pits that allow storage of up to 650 Mb of information as opposed to the quickly fading magnetic floppy disks which allow only a paltry 1.44 Mb. Multimedia designers at ELN spent 10 months putting this project together and the result is admirable.

It took about 15 minutes to get used to using the fairly intuitive interface, which allows the user to browse the different categories e.g., art, language, settlements, or conduct a text search. As well, the disc comes with a concise quick-start manual to assist the less experienced user. Most of the artwork and sounds are tasteful and blend in nicely with the overall design concept. There are lots of reconstructed skulls, pictures of burial sites and renderings of how people dressed in the centuries before Mindaugas. Animations and videos are narrated in Lithuanian with English subtitles. During one-and-a-half hours of continuous browsing, not a single broken hyperlink was noticed. Obviously, the staff at ELN did a very thorough job of testing before going to press.

Potential purchasers should note that Lietuva iki Mindaugo requires a fairly robust multimedia PC. Minimum and optimum system requirements are nicely diagrammed on the back of the box.

Native English speakers will notice that some of the translations are stylistically awkward and that the prose is tinged with an academic dryness at times,e.g. "ethnogenesis","cosmograms","etiological legends" although a searchable glossary of anthropological jargon is available. This CD-ROM also suffers from a lack of quick summaries for the different categories – lazy readers beware.

A peculiarity is the frivolous inclusion of three brief videos titled "Knight Fights of the Times of the Crusades" from the 1999 Living History Festival at Trakai Castle near Vilnius. Basically, grown-up men dressed in armor pretend to kill each other with swords accompanied by a lot of clanging and grunting as bemused tourists look on. It is a welcome addition if you haven't outgrown role-playing games or comic books but a bit odd for a historical CD-ROM. Nevertheless, for the serious history buff it is a worthwhile purchase at 69 Litas ($17.25).

Although hard data is unavailable at present, early indications are that sales of the product are good.

"We placed a demo station in the Vaga bookstore for 2 weeks and sold 30 discs. Similarly priced coffee table albums typically sell 2 to 3 copies a month," said Kristijonas Mazuras, director of ELN. The company had 3,150 discs pressed as they expect strong sales in the educational market in 2000.

The company raised most of the 500,000 litas ($125,000) for the project itself. They received some corporate sponsorship in exchange for placing corporate logos on the front cover of the box. The Lithuanian government kicked in 150,000 litas from its Sports and Culture fund.

In 1998, ELN produced a multimedia disc for the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in conjunction with the Swedish International Project. This educational disc includes animations explaining how nuclear power is produced, a review of safety systems at the Ignalina plant and sections on alternative energy (e.g. wind, solar) production.

Presently, the company is working on a complete electronic encyclopedia of Lithuanian history partially funded by George Soros' Open Society Fund that should appear toward the end of the year. ELN also attended the recent Frankfurt Book Fair hoping to secure foreign projects. Mazuras believes that his designers are as qualified as any Western techno-nerds while labor costs in Lithuania are significantly lower, making ELN a cost-effective alternative for foreign firms looking to farm out multimedia work.