Serials Solutions Summon Discovery Service Will Index Japanese Ebook Content from Maruzen

SEATTLE, Oct. 24, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Serials Solutions^®, a ProQuest^® business, and Maruzen Company Ltd., are increasing access to Japanese ebooks through the Summon discovery service. Metadata from the Maruzen eBook Library will be indexed in the Summon service and mutual subscribers of each company's service will be able to discover this authoritative ebook content, encompassing topics ranging from the humanities and social sciences to science, engineering and medicine.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120620/DE27948LOGO-c)

Users benefit from the Summon interface which is available in more than 32 languages and dialects, advanced native language searching capabilities and language-tuned relevancy for 17 languages. Unlike other discovery services, the Summon service leverages a unique match and merge technology that combines different types of metadata and information from multiple sources creating a single record optimized for discovery.

"The addition of this content demonstrates continued effort in offering academic institutions a discovery service with comprehensive coverage of Japanese-language materials in a single unified index," said Michael Hirsch, vice president, product management Serials Solutions. "We recognize the increasing demand for ebooks and are committed to making this content discoverable for researchers around the world."

Maruzen is a leading provider of books, journals and electronic content for universities and libraries in Japan. The company also offers education-related business services, library operations outsourcing services, and consulting for university facilities and libraries.

The Summon service is the first and only discovery service based on a single, unified index of content and contains more than 1.4 billion items in which the vast majority of article and book content is full-text searchable.  Used by more than 700 libraries in more than 40 countries, the Summon discovery service is proven to increase usage of library resources across a library's collection without bias to format, vendor, or platform. With the introduction of Summon^® 2.0 – groundbreaking features and a new, modern interface – the Summon service continues to deliver on its mission to return researchers to the library by providing a user experience that resonates with users familiar with open web search engines. Streamlined navigation and contextual guidance features significantly advance the research experience and provide greater opportunities for librarians to deliver value and scale their services to connect with more users.

75^th Anniversary of Landmark Innovation
ProQuest is celebrating the 75^th anniversary of microfilm and the legacy of innovations that have supported researchers and librarians for more than a century. The launch of University Microfilms, Inc. (UMI) introduced a new era for libraries, enabling preservation and sharing of large document collections.

To commemorate this pivotal milestone, the company created a comic book that tells the story in true superhero fashion of how microfilm became the gold standard for information preservation. Eugene B. Power and the Wild Beginnings of UMI is available in print and e-book format.

About ProQuest (www.proquest.com)
ProQuest connects people with vetted, reliable information. Key to serious research, the company's products are a gateway to the world's knowledge including dissertations, governmental and cultural archives, news, historical collections and ebooks. ProQuest technologies serve users across the critical points in research, helping them discover, access, share, create and manage information.

The company's cloud-based technologies offer flexible solutions for librarians, students and researchers through the ProQuest^®, Bowker^®, Dialog^®, ebrary^®, EBL^® and Serials Solutions^® businesses – and notable research tools such as the Summon^® discovery service, the RefWorks^® Flow™ collaboration platform, the Pivot™ research development tool and the Intota^® library services platform. The company is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with offices around the world.

SOURCE Serials Solutions