eBook Platforms

Credo Reference

Platform Name

Credo Reference

Address

Credo Reference
Prama House
267 Banbury Road
Oxford OX2 7HT
United Kingdom

URL

www.credoreference.com

Contact Email

anne.kail@credoreference.com

Contact Tel

01865 339 450

Titles

http://corp.credoreference.com/titles

Summary

Credo Reference is a vast, online reference library, providing access to the full text of hundreds of highly regarded and popular titles. Credo's huge library of over three million entries is made easily accessible in engaging and entertaining ways -- the concept map for visual learners, dynamic tables to make statistics meaningful, interactive maps, timelines to put events into historical context, talking dictionaries and the ever popular crossword solver. Credo brings the facts alive with images, sound files, animations, videos and much more. Find speedy, simple answers and full, in-depth articles.

Credo Reference contains dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries, thesauri, encyclopedias, quotations and atlases, plus a wide range of subject-specific titles covering everything from the arts to accountancy, science to Shakespeare and law to literature.

Credo Reference is constantly expanding and currently offers over 400 quality reference titles on every major subject from 70+ of the best publishers -- http://corp.credoreference.com/publishers -- and the collection continues to grow. Credo recently added many great new reference titles, including RUSA award-winning books from Greenwood, Gale, Cambridge University Press and more. We are focusing on adding award-winning academic titles in 2009 and already have nearly 100 scheduled for inclusion this year from publishers such as ABC-CLIO, University of Chicago Press, Elsevier Science and Technology, Harvard University Press, NYU Press and Routledge. See the complete list of forthcoming titles at http://corp.credoreference.com/forthcoming

Content

Business Models

Credo Reference aggregates content from the world's leading reference publishers and makes the content available on a subscription basis.

Licensing Models

Credo offers three subscription options, each of which provides access to dictionaries, general and subject-specific encyclopedias, biographies, quotations, atlases, images, interactive maps, audio pronunciation files, and customisable and exportable data tables.

Credo 100
This option allows you to choose any 100 titles from Credo Reference. You can change your content selection at any time during the life of your subscription to keep up with the evolving needs of your patrons.

Credo 150
This option allows you to choose any 150 titles from Credo Reference. You can change your content selection at any time during the life of your subscription to keep up with the evolving needs of your patrons.

Credo 250+
This option gives you access to all the titles from Credo Reference, and your subscription is automatically updated when new titles are added – 3 to 4 new titles are added each month.

Access Control

Authentication

• Username/Password
• IP Address
• Classic Athens
• SAML Compliant (e.g. Shibboleth)
• Referring URL
• EZ Proxy
• Member of UK Access Management Federation

Concurrency Limit

Credo offers unlimited, simultaneous users.

Restrictions

There are no major restrictions on access.

Notes

Information not provided

Search

Features

• Advanced Search
• Boolean AND
• Boolean NOT
• Boolean OR
• Exact Phrase
• Keywords
• Search by Title
• Search by Full Text
• Search by Date
• Simple Search
• Spell Check
• Saved Searches
• Wildcards
• Search Only Subscribed Content
• Search All Titles

Indexing

• Library of Congress
• Dewey Decimal

Cross Database Search

All titles offered by Credo Reference are integrated and cross-referenced. Cross database searching isn’t applicable.

Web Search

Users of Credo Reference can link directly from Credo into their other online resources. A search begun at Credo can be continued in another library resource with one click - through our new "Related Resources" feature. Librarians can choose which resources to include and add these resources through our Librarian Admin. (http://admin.credoreference.com)

Saved Searches

Users are able to save searches during their sessions. Saved entries can be exported to a citation management tool, printed or saved to a text file.

Search Tips

Credo offers context-specific help for its simple and advanced searches.

Search Other Content

Credo's "Related Resources" feature, described under Web Search, allows users to search across their library's other e-resources and library catalogue.

Search Results

Functionality

• Include Abstracts
• OpenURL linking

Ordering

By default, search results are sorted by relevance. Using our Advanced Search, users can choose to sort their results by date, length or relevance.

Presentation

Search results are ranked by relevancy. The result set, by default, will list the retrieved entries in a descending relevance order. These are some of the factors that determine the relevance score for an entry: word frequency, word proximity, entry length and image presence. Read more about Credo's relevance ranking at http://help.credoreference.com/Wiki.jsp?page=Powersearch

Selecting Results

Users may select search results and choose to print, email, save or export to a citation management tool. Users can choose the citation or the full-text entry when printing, emailing or saving.

Users can also choose to share entries through a social bookmarking site like Del.icio.us, Digg and many others.

Exporting

• Refwork
• Endnote
• Reference Manager
• ProCite
• Email

eBook Navigation

Presentation

Credo presents the full-text of each book in its collection.

Credo Reference uses innovative technology to enhance its content by adding Related Entries, which are cross-referenced links that connect related entries to one another and provide context for research. While traditional cross-references connect related terms within a single source, our Related Entries cut across topics, titles, publishers and text, audio and image files to deliver fast, accurate results.

Links

• Figure links
• Table links
• Graphic links
• Numbered reference links
• Additional resources (e.g. end matter, glossaries)

Restrictions

Information not provided

Other Functionality

Linking

• Title Linking
• Chapter Linking
• Page Linking
• Citation Linking
• Full Text Linking
• MARC linking
• Linking to OPAC
• Linking to VLE/MLE
• Open URL/Persistent URL

Help Information

Credo provides context sensitive help for its search results, advanced search, entry pages, etc. In addition, six tours of Credo are available through the help section. Credo's help pages are available at http://help.credoreference.com

Training

Credo offers frequent training webinars that cover new content, feature highlights, case studies and integration tips. Webinars can also be customised for individual libraries. A schedule of upcoming training sessions is available at http://corp.credoreference.com/training

Interface Customisation

Customisations available for the Credo interface include:

• Logo: Place your institution's logo in the top-right corner of the Credo interface
• Menu links: Configure up to three destinations to appear on the Credo main menu
• Continue your search: Add search links which allow a user to continue their search on another site or library e-resource
• Related Resources: link directly from a Credo entry into your other online library resources. View search results in your catalog or journal database with one click.

Alerting

Credo Reference offers two monthly e-newsletters:

1. Content Update: includes all new and updated titles added during the previous month. One title in each newsletter is highlighted as our "Featured Title of the Month."
2. Usages Statistics: reminder to current customers to check their usage statistics. (Usage statistics are updated daily and can be checked at any time.)

Software Updates

New and updated titles are released as they become available, typically weekly.

Usage Stats

• COUNTER Compliant Vendor
• Available Online

Metadata

• MARC
• Integration with Catalogues for MARC records

Technical Integration

Credo Reference provides two methods for metasearch vendors to access and search our content:

1. Credo Reference Z39.50 server
2. Credo Reference XML Gateway

OpenURL compliant.

VLE Integration

Credo's platform can integrate with VLE's. Persistent URLs are available for Credo's subjects, titles and entries.

Social Bookmarking

Users can choose to share entries through a social bookmarking site like Del.icio.us, Digg and many others. Links for social bookmarking are available on every entry page.

Language Support

Credo's interface is available in English, Chinese, French, Polish, Spanish and Urdu.

Other

Credo Reference’s Concept Map enables you to quickly find information when you want to expand your knowledge of a given area or if you don't know exactly what to look for. You can use it when you:

• want your search results in a visual form
• want more context for your research
• want to see more results on a single page
• don't know what you don't know... and want to find out!

The Concept Map is a visual map that displays how search terms and topics in Credo Reference are interconnected. The Concept Map displays the connections between search results in a visual, interactive and easy-to-use format. It enables users to quickly find information when they don't know what to look for, when they need topic ideas for papers or research projects, or want to expand their knowledge of a given area.

Accessibility

W3C Compliance

The Credo Reference web site adheres to the following standards and guidelines:

• W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Priority 1 and Priority 2 checkpoints -- compliance level Double-AA.

It is a priority for Credo that our system is accessible to all types of users, and we have designed Credo Reference to be used effectively by people with disabilities.

Credo is committed to compliance with disability aids, such as screen readers, and has tested the platform with the JAWS screen reader. Specific elements have been put in place to aid visually-impaired users, including each page on Credo has hyperlinks specifically placed to enable users with screen readers to skip common navigation elements of our pages and jump to a page's main content; provided relationships to the headers of pages to permit automated navigation to deep pages which helps screen readers navigate the site; and provided a narrative sitemap that describes pages within Credo to users who cannot see them. Credo provides text equivalents for images, charts and graphs.

Credo has been designed to be used with either keyboard or mouse controls. Our help section describes how to operate the various features of Credo Reference using only the keyboard:
http://help.credoreference.com/Wiki.jsp?page=Keyboard%20operation

Browser Compatibility

Browser requirements for Credo

• Credo supports Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8; Firefox 2 and 3; Safari 3; Opera 9; Netscape 9 and Chrome.
• Credo tested and supports browsers running on both Windows and Macintosh operating systems.
• Credo can be accessed by any web browser supporting HTML and cookies. Cookies are used to preserve login information and to maintain users' search terms between pages.

Plugins Required

Credo’s Concept Map requires Java 1.4.

Availability & Uptime

24/7 Uptime

The platform is available 24/7.

Downtime (as specified in service level agreements)

Periodically -- every 6 months to one year -- Credo will schedule one hour of downtime to make updates.

Mirror Sites

Credo has a single hosting center with multiple redundant data access lines. Credo is mirrored on 5 completely redundant servers.