ProQuest Partnerships Expand Access to International Dissertations and Theses

ANN ARBOR, Mich., April 8, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- ProQuest is digitizing more than 15,000 dissertations from premier European universities, providing broad, online access to these works for the first time. Digital discovery of the works from University College London, University of Aberdeen, Cardiff University, University of Leicester, University of Bath and University of Valencia will be through the universities' institutional repositories (IRs) and in the fourth quarter of 2013, through PQDT Global, a new resource for search and discovery of graduate works in emerging research areas from the world's top universities.

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"ProQuest's partnership with universities has been key to expanding the reach and impact of graduate works," said Mary Sauer-Games, ProQuest Vice-President of Information Solutions. "We're excited about how these new collaborations can take that impact to a global scale. By working together, we can enhance the visibility of both the institution and its PhD dissertation production in the worldwide research community."

ProQuest will manage all digitization, sharing digital copies of the works with sponsoring universities to build their IRs.  Works from authors who request broad distribution will be accessible through PQDT Global when that resource launches later this year. PQDT Global will combine content from a range of the world's premier universities – from the Ivy League to the Russell Group.  With planned additions of content from the U.K. and Continental Europe, PQDT Global is projected to grow to more than 2 million full text works and 3.5 million A&I records by 2015. An additional 90,000 full text works are expected to be added each subsequent year, including more than 15,000 works per year from Continental Europe, creating a rich, multi-lingual database.

PQDT Global is being developed by the same team of scholars and technologists behind ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT), the seminal repository of intellectual property and emerging research from the world's great universities. Originally created in 1939, PQDT now encompasses more than one quarter of a billion pages and is the official off-site repository for dissertations and theses for the United States Library of Congress. This growing trove of emerging research supports more than 2 million searches per year and is relied upon by scholars as a source of enlightening information and as a pivotal component in making their own scholarly production available to the world's intellectual communities.

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