Columbia Encyclopedia

The Columbia Encyclopedia is a one-volume universal lexicon in English first published in 1935 and published by Columbia University . It sees itself as a general quick reference work and is now also represented on the Internet. The Columbia Encyclopedia differs from its competing products in the detail of the individual articles at the expense of breadth.

history

The preparatory work for the Columbia Encyclopedia was done in the 1920s by Clarke Fisher Ansley. The first edition was published in 1935 in cooperation with the Collier publishing house with a volume of almost 2,000 pages. In 1950 and 1963 it was completely revised.

The fifth edition appeared in 1975. It counted 50,000 articles and contained numerous maps and illustrations. A third of the entries dealt with keywords from the field of geography , more than half of the articles were biographies , primarily by politicians.

The Columbia Encyclopedia Today

The editor of the sixth edition, which appeared in print in 2000, is Paul Lagassé. On over 3,000 pages, it comprises around 51,000 articles from all fields of knowledge, including - compared to the previous edition - almost 1,300 new entries and more than 80,000 cross-references. The preface to this edition states that the Columbia Encyclopedia is not intended to be a comprehensive work, it sees itself as a kind of "first aid" when looking up.

The sixth edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia is freely available as Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia on several portals over the Internet. The outputs differ from website to website in terms of the user interfaces. The digital version currently contains almost 52,000 keywords and more than 84,000 cross-references. The content is updated quarterly.

Numerous “Topic Pages” in Credo Reference are also taken from the encyclopedia.

In addition to the main work, there is a short version that has been published under the title Concise Columbia Encyclopedia . It is about a third of the size of the unabridged edition.

expenditure

• Clarke Fisher Ansley (Ed.): The Columbia Encyclopedia . 1st edition. PF Collier & son corporation by special arrangement with Columbia University Press, New York 1937.
• William Bridgwater and Elizabeth J. Sherwood (Eds.): The Columbia Encyclopedia . 2nd Edition. Columbia University Press, New York 1950 ( archive.org ).
• William Bridgwater and Seymour Kurtz (Eds.): The Columbia Encyclopedia . 3. Edition. Columbia University Press, New York 1964.
• William H. Harris and Judith S. Levey (Eds.): The New Columbia Encyclopedia . 4th edition. Columbia University Press, New York 1975.
• Judith S. Levey and Agnes Greenhall (Eds.): The concise Columbia encyclopedia . Columbia University Press, New York 1985, ISBN 0-231-06026-2 (large print).
• Judith S. Levey and Agnes Greenhall (Eds.): The concise Columbia encyclopedia . Columbia University Press, New York 1989, ISBN 0-231-06938-3 .
• Barbara A. Chernow and George A. Vallasi (Eds.): The Columbia Encyclopedia . 5th edition. Columbia University Press, New York 1993, ISBN 0-231-08098-0 .
• Paul Lagassé (Ed.): The Columbia Encyclopedia . 6th edition. Columbia University Press, New York 2000, ISBN 0-7876-5015-3 .

Web links

Free online editions of the sixth edition of the Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia (selection):

• Encyclopedia.com
• Information Please
• The Free Dictionary

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The article / print page ratio at Columbia is currently around 18, while the one-volume Brockhaus has around 70 articles per page.
2. ^ Preface. (No longer available online.) In: Columbia Encyclopedia. Columbia University Press, archived from the original September 30, 2011 ; accessed on August 12, 2011 (preface to the sixth edition, published 2000, free edition at yahoo.com). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ↑ The entry in the Library of Congress catalog dates the publication to “approx. 1937 “: lccn.loc.gov
4. ↑ ^{a b} Kanchan Gupta: Columbia Encyclopedia. In: Encyclopedia Britannica. September 20, 2007, accessed August 12, 2011 . 
5. ^ Preface. (No longer available online.) In: Columbia Encyclopedia. Columbia University Press, archived from the original September 30, 2011 ; Retrieved on August 12, 2011 : “You cannot learn everything here, but The Columbia Encyclopedia remains quite a kit for 'first aid.'” Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
6. ↑ Home. In: Farlex - The Free Dictionary. Retrieved August 12, 2011 .