Book killer: the great Who's Who dunnit

Second-hand book dealers of Britain - prepare to repel librarians. These creatures will shortly be descending on you in bulk, offering many tonnes of fat, red hardback books for which they have no further use. The collected Who's Who is bound to be the library purchase of the year. If you do not have a CD-Rom drive, this item alone will justify buying one - both for its fabulous content and for the shelf space it will liberate. The CD contains a complete century of Who's Who, with the full text of the 1996 edition plus the earlier Who Was Who, which consists of Who's Who entries updated by adding the subject's date of death. Because it is pure text, it is very fast to use, and searching in free text or by categories is simple. This makes the disc a terrific research tool, but also a timewaster's toy par excellence. Naturally I began by free text searching my own surname. There are eight Inces, but more fun was to follow. I found that the mother of Tony Flint, professor of zoology at Nottingham, was one of the clan, as was the mother of the Ferrantis of electronics fame, and I got to know a few residents of Ince Blundell in Lancashire. The free text search facility also allows more serious scholarship. A colleague who has written a PhD thesis on the Daily Herald asked for a search on the title, which produced more than 20 people he had heard of and about half a dozen whose connection with the paper he had not known about - including Cornelius Vanderbilt, publisher of a paper of the same name in San Francisco. The free text option also allows you to see who admits to what in their entries: 381 confess to a connection with astronomy, 1889 to economics and 1474 to chemistry.

A free text search can also produce unexpected insights. Ask for "solar" and a string of scientists appears. But so does the Maharaja of Jodhpur, who was "head of the great Rathore clan of Rajputs, a branch of the great solar race of antiquity." More serious research can be carried out with the "occupations" search option. This reveals the presence of 83 violinists, including such names as Menuhin, Zukerman and Kremer, but only three violists. There are 1,892 ambassadors and 952 vice chancellors. But in a scandalous case of bias, there are 373 chemists, 14 alchemists and exactly one chemical engineer. Other ways of searching the disc allow the combination of search terms or, for the truly dedicated, scrolling through the whole muster, starting with A, until you get to the person you want. But if you know the person you need to find, the time-honoured option of typing in their surname will still work fastest. An obvious surname is Hitler, and here he is complete with job titles (party leader, Fuhrer, supreme war lord and supreme law lord), his phone number, the publication dates of both volumes of Mein Kampf and his claimed religion, Catholic.

Stalin lists his many arrests and escapes prior to his rise to Marshal of the Soviet Union. Trotsky's entry, by comparison, is absurdly short, listing only one of his many books.

The Who's Who disc is not perfect. For one thing, it is confused about names and titles. Dr Smith, Professor Smith, Rev Smith, Right Rev Smith and Sir John Smith would appear in that order irrespective of their first names. Also at issue is the future of the digital and print versions of Who's Who. This is a rare case where the disc genuinely could kill off the paper book, partly because of its technical superiority and partly because most use is in offices and libraries which are likely to have a CD-Rom drive. The plan is for a possible update of the CD in 1998, perhaps becoming annual thereafter, depending upon sales of both the book and the disc.

Martin Ince is deputy editor of The THES.