The Columbia Encyclopedia is a one-volume encyclopedia

Encyclopedia

An encyclopedia is a type of reference work, a compendium holding a summary of information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge....

 produced by Columbia University Press

Columbia University Press

Columbia University Press is a university press based in New York City, and affiliated with Columbia University. It is currently directed by James D. Jordan and publishes titles in the humanities and sciences, including the fields of literary and cultural studies, history, social work, sociology,...

 and sold by the Gale Group. First published in 1935, and continuing its important relationship with Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

, the encyclopedia underwent major revisions in 1950 and 1963; 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

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

. See External links below. This edition, which is marked up

Markup language

A markup language is a modern system for annotating a text in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from that text. The idea and terminology evolved from the "marking up" of manuscripts, i.e. the revision instructions by editors, traditionally written with a blue pencil on authors' manuscripts...

 in SGML

Standard Generalized Markup Language

The Standard Generalized Markup Language is an ISO-standard technology for defining generalized markup languages for documents...

, 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 (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).

External links

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia is available from (in alphabetical order):

• Answers.com (People) -- Free Site - Does not have popups but does have banners. Entries are separated into two groups: people, and all other subjects.
• allRefer Reference, part of allRefer -- Site has many pop-ups and banners.
• 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.

• Preface to the 6th edition -- gives more information on the current edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia