ProQuest Enhances Strategic Acquisition and Discovery of e-Books

ANN ARBOR, Mich., Nov. 7, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --  ProQuest is boosting the visibility of e-books in library collections by providing for the full text of an additional 400,000 e-books to be discovered and accessed as part of a broad search of library holdings. The initiative to improve e-book visibility began in early 2011 when Serials Solutions pioneered indexing of the contents of the HathiTrust collection in its Summon® discovery service. Just months later, ProQuest debuted the first full-text indexing of ebrary's popular collection of e-books. Now, ProQuest expands that effort with virtually every title in ebrary's collection richly indexed in the Summon service and discoverable from the "front door" of the library.

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"Our 2011 Global Student E-book Survey identified discovery as an area of the e-book experience that could be substantially improved," said Kurt Sanford, ProQuest CEO. "More than 47 percent of respondents reported that they aren't using e-books because they don't know where to find them. With all of ebrary's titles indexed within Summon, researchers and faculty can now more efficiently discover them, enabling the library to earn more value from its e-book collection."

The Summon service searches more full text than any other discovery service, exposing researchers to content in collections that might otherwise remain buried. Summon searches across all of a library's ebrary products, encompassing titles acquired through subscription, patron driven acquisition, short-term loan, and perpetual archive models. As a result, strategic acquisition can occur within the ebrary platform but can start from the library's point of discovery, dramatically streamlining ordering and precisely tuning the library's holdings to users' needs.

"ProQuest is committed to pioneering technology and business models that empower libraries to get more from their content investments and deliver the best research experience for their users," said Mr. Sanford. "Combining the expertise across the ProQuest enterprise with deep understanding of our customers needs, we intend to continually remove obstacles between people and information, advancing knowledge around the world."

About the Summon Service

Used by more than 500 libraries in more than 40 countries, the Summon service is the first and only discovery service based on a unified index of content, leveraging its unique "match and merge" technology to combine rich metadata and full text from multiple sources to ultimately make items more discoverable. In just three years, the Summon unified index has grown from 200 million items to more than one billion items – with the vast majority of article and book content full-text searchable. Proven to increase usage of library resources, the Summon service consistently meets user expectations by delivering innovative new features for enhancing discovery.

About ProQuest (www.proquest.com)

ProQuest connects people with vetted, reliable information.  Key to serious research, the company has forged a 70-year reputation as a gateway to the world's knowledge – from dissertations to governmental and cultural archives to news, in all its forms.  Its role is essential to libraries and other organizations whose missions depend on the management and delivery of complete, trustworthy information.

ProQuest's massive information pool is made accessible in research environments that accelerate productivity, empowering users to discover, create, and share knowledge.

An energetic, fast-growing organization, ProQuest includes the ProQuest®, Bowker®, Dialog®, ebrary®, and Serials Solutions® businesses and notable research tools such as the RefWorks® and Pivot™ services, as well as its' Summon® web-scale discovery service.  The company is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with offices around the world.

SOURCE ProQuest