Credo Reference

Credo Reference is a company that offers subscription-based online reference content. It provides full-text online versions of more than 700 published reference works from over 70 publishers, including general and subject dictionaries and encyclopedias.
History.
The company began in 1999 and has offices in Oxford, England, and Boston, Massachusetts. It changed its name from Xrefer in 2007.
Subscriptions are available to academic, government, public and company libraries. Access to Credo Reference is free to users if their library is a subscriber. Librarians can select which titles they wish to subscribe to within Credo General Reference. They can manage the selection during 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 free service stopped.