Five years ago, the Wildlife CD-ROM titled 'The Golden Bird' was launched. The objective
was to create a product which was of the finest possible quality and aimed at the
macro level of the Indian education system. The KaleidoIndia team has put together
material on a subject which is not very easy to document in the Indian subcontinent
where most wild species are endangered and rare to come by.
The content is truly encyclopaedic in its scope and designed to be of interest to
a wide cross-section of people from casual browsers to experts. The content matter
of the CD covers the following subject areas:
- Overview of Indian wildlife.
- India's wild habitats.
- Detailed sections on Indian animal species, comprising all groups of mammala, birds,
amphibians, reptiles, and fish.
- Protected Areas: Sanctuaries and National Parks.
- Conservation and Management (people and social issues, government and non-government
agencies).
- Wildlife Trade and Traffic.
- Wildlife Law.
The CD content also constitutes a diffuse database comprising:
- Maps and overlays (areas, species distribution and range)
- Statistics, Fact sheets, Dictionary/Glossary of conservation terms.
- Glossary of English, Indian vernacular and Latin names
- Bibliographies and References.
Text listings and descriptions have been integrated with pictures, video and sound
and, where the subject so demands, information has been supplemented with graphics
and animations to illustrate special features.
A high quality image bank comprising over 4000 still images (colour and B&W pictures,
artworks, line drawings) and 40 minutes of edited motion film has been incorporated
in the CD-ROM. All these have been interactively linked through specially designed
navigational screens.
For the expert and more technically inclined user, in-depth data in the form of
extracts of research papers and lists of references for further reading have also
been provided.
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