Credo Reference, formerly Xrefer, is a company that offers subscription-based online reference content. It provides online versions of 400+ published reference works from over 70 publishers, including general and specialist dictionaries and encyclopedias.

The company was founded in 1999 and has offices in Oxford, England, and Boston, Massachusetts. It changed its name from Xrefer in 2007 and its England office moved from London to Oxford the same year.

Subscriptions are available to academic, government, public and company libraries. Access to Credo Reference is free to end-users provided their library is a subscriber. Rather than selling pre-configured content packages, librarians can select which titles they wish to subscribe to within xreferplus and manage the selection throughout their subscription period by swapping titles in and out.

Between 2000 and 2003 Xrefer offered a free site supported by advertising, and was one of Wikipedia's main competitors as a free content encyclopedia. When the dot com bust caused Internet advertising revenues to collapse, Xrefer launched a premium subscription variant, called Xreferplus. On 17 June 2003, the gratuit "Xrefer showcase" service was discontinued.

[edit] External links

• Credo Reference website
• Credo Reference subscription site
• Credo Reference 30 day free trial for libraries