Happy Birthday to Credo Reference!
Credo Reference turns 10 this month! We’ve certainly come a long way in the past 10 years. We started as Xrefer, an ad-supported site based in London. Today, we are a subscription site with offices in both Boston, MA and Oxford. Our President, John Dove, recently did a Q&A with Library Journal, where he talks a bit about our origins, and our more recent name change:
How was Credo Reference born? Was there an a-ha! moment?
Adam Hodgkin, former reference editor for Oxford University Press, was the brainchild behind Credo. In 1999, Adam realized that the movement of content to the online world was overdue when it came to reference information. He conceived of a dot-com based on reference content that could be supported by advertising. And his team of experts in technology, sales, and marketing quickly brought Xrefer.com to life. Xrefer would have met the fate of 99 percent of dot-com start-ups if it had not been for two things: one, Adam’s team quickly realized that the advertising model wouldn’t be sustainable, and two, Adam found Bela Hatvany, who had twice before built worldwide companies that served libraries.
Why the name change from Xrefer to Credo?
It was at a RUSA President’s Program at ALA in 2005, where I appeared along with Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and four other panelists. A reference librarian said from the audience, “Don’t you all get it? Wikipedia, Google—these are fun words to say and are popular with students.” At that point, I was determined we’d get a new name. We wanted a name that stood for an important characteristic of our company and its products. “Credo” and its association with credible put a point on the fact that our information comes from authoritative sources.
Read the whole article here.
Here’s to many more years of providing high-quality reference content on an innovative platform!
