BIMA Gold for  Acorn  CD ROM  from ILP 

Release Date 25th June 1993 

A CD ROM offering encyclopaedic information on British Birds has won a 
prestigious gold award at the British Interactive Multimedia Association's 
awards ceremony in London for its producers, Interactive Learning 
Productions of Newcastle. 

The disc, which was produced in collaboration with the British Library and 
the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, is available in both RISC OS 
(Acorn) and MPC formats, but it was the Acorn version that scooped first 
prize in the category of Best Education CD ROM Title. 

The Acorn version of British Birds offers the capabilities of Full Motion 
Video, text, sound, images and hyperlinks and can run on any Acorn 
Archimedes 32-bit RISC computers which are commonly found in schools today. 

ILP was formed in 1990 following the completion of a project, based at 
Newcastle University, which had been set up to research and develop the 
potential of multimedia. It works closely with other institutions such as 
the British Library, Yorkshire TV, the Ministry of Agriculture and British 
Rail, and it plans to release a number of new CD ROM titles in the next few 
months. 

ILP's Director, Fred Grainger praised the Acorn platform for its 
versatility. "The Archimedes  is a magnificent machine which offers all the 
facilities we need of a multimedia platform. It is because of this that we 
author all of our CD ROMs on the Acorn computer prior to porting those 
sections of the application over to an MPC platform that it is able to cope 
with." 

This year's award follows on from the success of last year when ILP won a 
Gold Award for an interactive computer display, using 30 Acorn computers, 
especially commissioned for the Ministry of Agriculture, and on display for 
half a year at Alton Towers. 

Acorn's Technical Director Malcolm Bird said "From the early phases of the 
project Acorn was attracted by the strength of the combined team approach of 
RSPB, British Library and ILP.  We have been pleased to support the project 
and work with ILP in utilising the strong multimedia capabilities of the 
standard Acorn platforms.  It is particularly encouraging to find that our 
platforms could provide the most cost effective multimedia capabilities for 
schools and the British Birds CD for the Archimedes well deserves the 
recognition it has now achieved through this award. " 

ENDS 

Further information from: Fred Grainger - 091 261 1255 

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