These pictures form part of a legendary Tang Dynasty love story which formed the basis of an epic Chinese poem, and 800 years later was turned into a hand-painted Japanese silk scroll. That scroll is now in Dublin, among the countless treasures of the Chester Beatty Library, and the library has published a CD-Rom based on it: The Chogonka Scroll: A Japanese Masterpiece of the Seventeenth Century. In many ways CD-Rom is an ideal medium for a library with priceless documents which can be displayed only in a carefully controlled environment. The disk offers a means to explore a representation of the artefact, with the added value of a commentary, footnotes and historical background and list of characters. The interface is clear and unshowy, with a choice of Irish, English, German, French or Japanese commentary - plus a reading of the poem in its original Mandarin. Focusing (quite rightly) on the scroll itself, there is a measured, scene by scene presentation. If there was a temptation to bung in anything like a Chogonka quiz, or a Tang Dynasty shoot-em-up as a crowd-pleaser it has been resisted. Once again, this is a CD-Rom version of something also used as a display kiosk, and the pace of the latter can be irritating to a PC user who wants to jump back to a particular scene for another look. Also irritating (on a PC) is the insistence on running in 256-colour display mode only, and the way double-clicking on the CD didn't open and run it. (Right-click and choose Explore instead.) It ran smoothly on a Macintosh, however.
Quirks aside, this is an attractive disk that draws the user into another age. Once the user has settled into its pace it is most enjoyable and, being quite different in style to most mainstream CD-Roms, it serves as a reminder of the possibilities of the very new medium.