Serials Solutions to Enable Full-Text Search of the HathiTrust Collection from the Summon™ Service

ANN ARBOR, Mich., March 28, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- ProQuest business unit Serials Solutions and HathiTrust today announced an agreement to enable full-text search of the entire HathiTrust collection of digitized scholarly books from the Summon™ web-scale discovery service. Researchers and faculty at institutions with the Summon™ service will be able to use the library's own website to search the full text of its print books and serials, and discover materials relevant to their research topics. This collaboration makes the full text of much of the library's physical collection as easily searchable as its electronic content.

"The HathiTrust collection today includes a significant, and growing, percentage of all the books contained within research libraries," said John Wilkin, executive director of HathiTrust and associate university librarian at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "We believe the library community needs strong platforms that make the discovery of quality content in libraries' collections as easy and compelling as commercial web alternatives. In making the HathiTrust searchable from the Summon discovery service, we are enabling users to easily and efficiently search the full text of the entire HathiTrust collection concurrent with their exploration of a library's other collections. We see this significant step forward in discoverability aiding HathiTrust in ensuring the accessibility and long-term preservation of this vast record of cultural heritage and collected knowledge."

Soon researchers at any library with the Summon™ service will effectively search the full text of more than 8.4 million total volumes in the HathiTrust collection, including more than 4.6 million book titles and over 200,000 serials titles— nearly three billion pages. Once users locate the information they need using the Summon™ search box, they can access public domain materials directly from the HathiTrust, as well as be directed to the digital and physical content in the collections of their respective libraries.

Designed by Serials Solutions with a no-compromise commitment to meeting the comprehensive discovery needs of today's scholars and researchers, the Summon™ service provides users with a simple and compelling starting point to search the full breadth of a library's content. Already adopted by more than 200 academic and research libraries worldwide, the Summon™ service delivers proven value to the library with a measurable impact on the use of resources.

"This collaboration with HathiTrust is a significant milestone for libraries, emphasizing their centrality to the research process," said Marty Kahn, CEO of ProQuest. "HathiTrust's work of bringing the expansive print collections of libraries into the digital environment of today's researchers is truly monumental.  With this agreement, Serials Solutions and HathiTrust bring the promise of that accomplishment into the hands of the library and its users."

Researchers will see considerable benefits from this agreement. From aggregation of information to collaboration across the research process, the ability to search the full text of any document preserved in the HathiTrust collection, as well as their library's other collections, will unlock new possibilities for discovering material in a range of resources, including books.

As an example, the collaboration between HathiTrust and Serials Solutions will significantly impact the digital humanities, which involves the investigation, analysis, synthesis and presentation of information in electronic form. For instance, with the ability to quickly and easily search the full text of books for a specific word or phrase over a given period of time, researchers will glean new insights and do in-depth analysis that was extremely difficult and time consuming to do...until now.

SOURCE ProQuest