Discovering Craven: an interactive exploration of the Geology, Landscape History and Archaeology of the Craven Area of the Yorkshire Dales National Park. CD-Rom. Written and designed by Trevor Croucher DataGraphics 2000. Designed to run on Windows 95, Windows 98 or later. 
Available from http://www.nmvdigital.com Price: £27.50 including p&p within UK 

Discovering Craven is aimed at the general reader, and provides a beautifully illustrated and presented interactive CD-Rom, created with Illuminatus Interactive. Craven is one of the seven districts within the county of North Yorkshire, a large area of which falls within the Yorkshire Dales National Park. 

As if viewing an electronic book, the user can explore the geology, landscape history and archaeology of Craven up to the early medieval period. There are 226 pages in total, each with a nicely balanced combination of text and images, including photographs, digital location maps, site plans and 3-D landscape models that are mostly in colour. The Digital Maps have been created by Pioneer GIS and Mapping (Graffix Systems Ltd.) using Bartholomew GB 1:25000 digital map data; the 3-D landscape models using Visual Explorer (Woolleysoft) with contour data from the Ordnance Survey Land-Form Panorama DTM. With the appropriate screen resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels, the full page layout automatically fills the screen, thus avoiding the need to scroll up and down, or maximise the window.

The 'book' is divided into eight main sections, accessible from buttons on the main menu (see Fig. 1), comprising 25 chapters; an overview of each is given at the beginning of each section to give a clear idea of content. The user can choose their own route through the CD-Rom, facilitated by navigation buttons in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, with the option of returning to the main menu on every page. Each page is numbered and there is also an alphabetical index that can be opened from the main menu, and minimised for ease of reference, that takes the reader to specific pages through hypertext links.

Selected images and digital maps have pop-up keys to open supplementary windows providing details of the sites shown and/or additional illustrations. As the CD-Rom was initially produced for the Craven Museum in Skipton, many pages have a button to open windows with specific information about related geological and archaeological exhibits within the museum, which readers are encouraged to visit. 

In addition, there is an extensive bibliography of further sources of information, although there is no mention of the Sites and Monuments Records held both by North Yorkshire County Council and the Yorkshire Dales National Park. 

This is a very attractive and user-friendly guide to the Craven area. A wealth of information is included, with clear and eye-catching diagrams and images that are of educational value, and of interest and use to both the general reader and the specialist alike.