Columbia Encyclopedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Columbia Encyclopedia is a one-volume encyclopedia produced by Columbia University Press and sold by the Gale Group. First published in 1935 [1], the current edition is the sixth, printed in 2000. It contains over 51,000 articles totaling some 6.5 million words and has also been published in two volumes.
An electronic version of the encyclopedia is available and is licensed by several different companies for use over the World Wide Web. This edition, which is marked up in SGML, is updated on a quarterly basis and contains over 84,000 hyperlinked cross-references. Unlike many other major English-language encyclopedias, the complete content of the Columbia encyclopedia is available online to individual users without payment. (Most others make a subset of their content available, and the user is from time to time informed that more content is only available to subscribers.)
A particular strength of the Columbia encyclopedia in comparison to other similar reference works might be its concise but often well-written biographies, particularly of artists and writers, usually accompanied by carefully selected bibliographies.
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[edit] External links
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia is available from (in alphabetical order):
- Answers.com -- Free Site - Does not have popups but does have banners.
- allRefer Reference, part of allRefer -- Site has many pop-ups and banners.
- Bartleby -- Site has popups and banners. Search engine finds only complete word matches unless a wildcard '*' is used.
- Encyclopedia.com, part of eLibrary -- Site has some banners, but no pop-ups
- Information Please, part of the Family Education Network -- Site has banners
- The Free Dictionary -- Site does not have any advertisements, but some content only available with a subscription
- Yahoo! -- Site has a few banners. Wildcard searching less powerful than on Bartleby version: for instance bodybuild* finds several hits on Bartleby but none on Yahoo!
[edit] Critical views
- The Columbia Encyclopedia's Crimes Against The Truth. By Joseph McCabe; an anti-religious tract that claims the 1950 edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia to have been heavily apologetic and distorting.
