ProQuest

ProQuest provides seamless access to and navigation of more than 125 billion digital pages of the world's scholarship, delivering it to the desktop and into the workflow of serious researchers in multiple fields, from arts, literature, and social science to science, technology, and medicine. ProQuest is part of Cambridge Information Group (www.cambridgeinformationgroup.com).

ProQuest's vast content pools are available to researchers through libraries of all types and include the world's largest digital newspaper archive, periodical databases comprising the output of more than 9,000 titles and spanning more than 500 years, the pre-eminent dissertation collection, and various other scholarly collections. Users access the information through the ProQuest® and CSA Illumina™ online information systems, Chadwyck-Healey™ electronic and microform resources, UMI® microform and print reference products, eLibrary® and SIRS® educational resources, Ulrich's® Serials Analysis System, COS Scholar Universe, and Serials Solutions® resource management tools. Through the expertise of business units Serials Solutions and COS, ProQuest provides technological tools that allow researchers and libraries to better manage and use their information resources. For more information, visit www.proquest.com, www.proquest.co.uk, and www.csa.com

History

Eugene Power founded the company as University Microfilms in 1938, preserving works from the British Museum on microfilm. He also noticed a niche market in dissertations publishing. Students were often forced to publish their own works in order to finish their doctoral degree. Dissertations could be published more cheaply as microfilm than as books. As this market grew, the company expanded into filming newspapers and periodicals. ProQuest still publishes so many dissertations that its digital dissertations collection has been declared the official U.S. off-site repository of the Library of Congress.

In his autobiography Edition of One, Power details the development of the company, including how University Microfilms assisted the OSS during World War II. This work mainly involved filming maps and European newspapers so they could be shipped back and forth overseas more cheaply and discreetly.

Xerox owned the company for a time in the 1970s and 1980s, and it was later bought by Bell & Howell. The name of the company changed several times in this period, from University Microfilms to Xerox University Microfilms, to University Microfilms International, then shortened to UMI (possibly meant to distance itself from the seemingly archaic medium of microfilm).

In the 1980s, UMI began producing CD-ROMs that stored databases of periodicals abstracts and indexes, eventually leading to online subscriptions to databases.

In the 1990s, with many new electronic media available, microform seemed to be on the decline. The company has tried to ride this wave out and catch the next wave by emphasizing its electronic business, including selling access to online versions of current periodicals, mainly sold to schools, universities or libraries. The ProQuest vision of its place in electronic content expanded further in acquiring Seattle start-up Serials Solutions, a venture providing access management and search services for content hosted by other companies.

In 1999, the name changed to Bell & Howell Information and Learning, and finally in 2001 to ProQuest Information and Learning.

In 1998 ProQuest announced the "Digital Vault Initiative", purported to include 5.5 billion images digitized from UMI microfilm, including some of the best existing copies of major newspapers dating back 100 to 150 years, and Early English books dating back to the 1400s. The project when launched was overstated in scope, however. ProQuest was acquired in 2006 by the Cambridge Information Group and merged with CSA in 2007.

See also

• University Microfilms International

References

• Eugene B. Power, Edition of One: The Autobiography of Eugene B. Power, Founder of University Microfilms, 1990 ISBN 0-8357-0898-5.

External links

• ProQuest (Information on company)