The year 1996 is the bi-centenary of the death of Scotland’s most illustrious son, Robert Burns. Even now, his admirers and there doesn’t seem to be a corner of the planet which doesn’t have a thriving Burns Society are preparing for the celebrations, and putting in their orders for a CD-Rom currently in preparation on the bonnie bonnie banks of the ... Cam.

The Cambridge Software House (CSH) is busily putting the finishing touches to The World of Robert Burns - initially for Acorn RiscOS machines, but eventually to be adapted for PCs.

It isn’t, like so many CD-Roms, simply a souped-up electronic version of an existing book. Brian Richardson at CSH and the team responsible for the award-winning package, Frontier 2000, have spent the best part of two years gathering a wealth of material, most of which has never been published before.

They have ransacked the archives and museum at Dumfries, the town where the poet lived out the last chapter of his rumbustious life. They have visited various sites where it is alleged that Burns wrote some of his most famous poems. They have ploughed through worthy tomes; listened to countless anecdotes, and, inevitably, taken a cup o’ kindness in all the poet’s favourite watering holes. It has resulted in a unique collection of video, audio and written material.

The CD-Rom contains sound files ranging from plaintive lone pipers to hearty recitations of poems such as “Address to the Haggis” (“Great chieftain o’ the puddin’-race!”).

There are “Maestro” files of most of the music of the 200 or so songs that Burns, an indefatigable archivist himself, adapted or wrote. There are over 1,000 still photographs and 50 video clips, many in full-screen format, perhaps for the first time on a RiscOS CD-Rom. There are hundreds of potted biographies of the men with whom Burns caroused or quarrelled, and the women who inspired some of the most touching love poems in the language. There are maps, town plans, manuscript facsimiles, se-lections from Burns’s letters, a 20,000-word timeline, worksheets and classroom support material.

The compilers haven’t restricted themselves to Burns and his immediate circle. They’ve scoured the area for anything that might be of general interest to visitors. So, as well as plaintive pipes, or spirited renditions of the “Selkirk Grace” and “The Cotter’s Saturday”, users shouldn’t be surprised to stumble upon photographs of prototype bi- cycles, film clips of salmon fishermen or files of meteorological data.

Of course, at the heart of the CD are the words of all Burns’s songs and poems or, to be exact, nearly all the words. He wasn’t averse to using a few four-letter ones and even 13-letter ones. “Houghmagandie”, for instance, is not the sort of word pupils should be allowed to bandy around the classroom. Nor should teachers tolerate the use of “spleuchan”, “warlum’’ and “moudiewart”. Their meaning, together with those of all the other dialect words which make Burns’s poetry so distinctive and sometimes so difficult , are defined in a glossary on the menu bar.

If teachers are worried about the fruitier words, a simple censoring system can be used to replace them with blanks. This could provide pupils, acquainted with cloze exercises, with hours of engrossing fun.

The CD, which will be launched officially at BETT ‘95, has been structured with the busy school teacher in mind. Pupils are given a series of clues, and sent on “adventure trails” to explore the data for themselves. They start with a large-scale digitised map of the Ayr, Dumfries and Galloway region.

They can select a town, village or farmstead, and then a mere click on the wee, sleekit, tim’rous mousie, will zoom them in on that location. If they’d selected the town of Dumfries, for instance, they might then choose the Globe Inn and listen to the landlady taking them on a guided tour. Or they might go to St Michael’s churchyard to see Burns’s burial place.

As well as assignments built into the package, teachers and pupils will find it easy to program in their own, thus transforming the whole database into the location for a glorious, and educational, game of hunt the thimble.

What’s more, everything on the CD can be simply downloaded to printer or to disc. So, for instance, historians could find uses for the timeline, while the Maestro files offer music teachers a huge collection of tunes.

Burns’s devotees, of course, are going to welcome this remarkable celebration of their hero’s life and times, but it’s also going to provide an ideal source of preparatory material a virtual field trip for any classes fortunate enough to be within a coach ride of Dumfries, they’ll find it’s even better.

The World of Robert Burns. Risc OS, Pounds 79.95. PC version soon.CSH, The Computer Centre, 8 Bramley Road, St Ives, Cambs PE17 4WS CSH stand 313