QUOTATIONARY: WIT AND WISDOM OF THE AGES AT YOUR FINGERTIPS; Edited and compiled by C. Smith Sumner; NovaSoft; $39.95.Quotations have been accessible on CD-Roms for some time, but most are notoriously hard to negotiate. Usually, the exact key word is necessary to call it up, and some of us have spent hours trying to find salient quotations from Benjamin Disraeli, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy or Gordon B. Hinckley.
The problem is that many software programs containing quotations require key words or phrases that are very specific to access them. Some of these programs provide whole pages of text, leaving it to the user to find the tidbit he is diligently seeking.
"Quotationary" has corrected that problem by simplifying the method of access so that users can find suitable quotations and then quickly use them to prepare lectures, talks, business presentations, newsletters, research papers, etc. NovaSoft calls a "ready resource" that is "equally swift in either PC or MAC formats.
The user can quickly access the quotation by plugging in a topic, an author, a topic and author, or by key words in the statement. The quotations then pop up ready to copy or download in seconds. This is possible even when searching for obscure quotations, one-liners or short poems.
There is also a section in which the user may record his or her own favorite quotations.
The product is the culmination of the devotion of Salt Lake resident, C. Smith Sumner, who spent 15 years collecting classic lines, epigrams, thoughts and poems -- most with sources -- from more than 700 major authors and hundreds of others. Such famous people as Benjamin Franklin, John Milton, Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, Confucius, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoi, Thomas Jefferson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Brigham Young, Socrates and numerous others on such wide-ranging topics as love, marriage, money, work, business, virtue, wisdom, faith, government, death and taxes.
This is a gold mine, with 32,000 quotations in all.