Encyclopedia.com vs Encyclopedia Virginia

Encyclopedia.com is a free web reference service with over 300,000 entries from published sources including Oxford University Press and the Columbia Encyclopedia. It also offers more than 50,000 topic summaries with related pictures, videos, and newspaper and magazine articles. The site says it continually updates partner content and allows searches across more than 200 encyclopedias and reference books. Users can search with keywords or browse alphabetically. Results are ordered by relevance according to how often a search term appears in an article. The FAQ gives citation details for The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, including its 2008 publication information. The service is available on the web, and its privacy policy also refers to a mobile application named “Encyclopedia.” Terms allow personal searching, display, downloading, and printing, but prohibit systematic downloading or scraping without permission. The privacy policy describes collection of account, device, browsing, cookie, and session information, as well as an advertising affiliation with CMI Marketing, doing business as CafeMedia.

Encyclopedia Virginia is a free multimedia and interactive web resource about Virginia’s history and culture. Its topical and biographical entries are written by scholars for general readers, then reviewed by contributors and editors, fact checkers, and copy editors. Articles can include primary documents, images, audio and video clips, and virtual tours; the wider media collection also contains podcasts and 3D objects. Readers can search or browse alphabetically, by biography, category, map, or media. The Encyclopedia Virginia Map App presents historical events through maps, distance-ordered lists, and category filters. Classroom-oriented versions are labeled for Grade 4, Grade 8, and Grades 11+. New entries continue to be published. Since 2012, the project has been digital publisher for the ongoing Dictionary of Virginia Biography with the Library of Virginia. Text uses a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. The site says it does not own copyrights to displayed media objects.