The Columbia Encyclopedia is a one-volume encyclopedia produced by Columbia University Press and sold by the Gale Group . First published in 1936, the current edition is the sixth, printed in 2000. It contains over 52,000 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.
A particular strength of the Columbia encyclopedia in comparison to other similar reference works might be its concise but often poignant biographies, particularly of artists, usually accompanied by carefully selected bibliographies. On the negative side, this encyclopedia has sometimes been accused of having a religious or ethnic bias. While this view has been mainly prevalent with regard to past editions (see below), some people still perceive a certain bias to be present.
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The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia is available from:
Critical views
