News & Announcements from ALA Midwinter 1/26/13

On January 27, 2013 · Leave a Comment · In News & Announcements

At the Midwinter meeting in Seattle, ProQuest announced plans to:

Provide content that has been largely inaccessible to global researchers with a significant expansion of its … History Vault, a five-year program to provide central access to the key archival collections that document the most important and widely studied topics of 18th- through 20th-century America. Six new modules will surface documents that enable fresh insight into the Civil and Women’s Rights Movements, Immigration and World War II…

Add coverage of the history and culture of China to ProQuest Historical and Current Newspaper Archive by digitizing “a dozen of the country’s most important English-language newspapers. The collection of papers, including North China Herald, The China Press, The China Critic, and the China Weekly Review, provides a primary source chronicle of the country’s turbulent transition from Imperial rule to the founding of the Republic. The Chinese Newspapers Collection captures all editions published 1832 through 1953 from cover and cover…

Unveil “its new ProQuest Congressional, which has been rebuilt with an all-new technological framework that supports richer, more in-depth exploration and expanded use of its unique content. Acquired by ProQuest in late 2010, the one-of-a-kind service captures the breadth of governmental output, providing users with efficient, targeted access to the most comprehensive collection of historic and current congressional information available anywhere online…”

Partner with the Bibliothèque national de France (BnF) in Paris “to expand access to the Library’s rich historical treasures. As part of its Early European Books program, ProQuest will digitize about 70,000 volumes from BnF’s collection of European books printed before 1700. The collection, which is world renowned for its breadth and quality, includes 3,000 works printed before 1501, providing researchers with simple, online insight into early European history and culture…”

In addition, Serial Solutions, a ProQuest company announced plans to:

Debut the Intota web-scale management solution with Intota Assessment which will be “available later this year, the new service includes a … suite of business intelligence tools to help libraries make informed decisions regarding collection development. Intota Assessment will also be part of Intota delivering best in class assessment functionality in a library services platform (LSP) solution.

Introduce Summon Spotlighting, a new feature of the Summon discovery service, provides dynamic display options for specialized content types. Image Spotlighting dramatically improves discoverability of libraries’ most unique and valued collections. Libraries benefit from increased exposure and use of their local collections, image content and archival materials – and researchers are able to discover, view and navigate this high value content in an experience similar to Open Web search engines.