ProQuest Automates Ebrary And EBL Holdings In Its Summon, 360 Services
ANN ARBOR (WWJ) -- The Ann Arbor information and database publisher ProQuest said Thursday it is streamlining librarian workflows by automating holdings updates for its e-books businesses, Ebrary and EBL Ebook Library in the knowledgebase supporting the Summon service as well as its 360 discovery and management services.
The process, which is currently in beta testing, eliminates the need for librarians to manually load records and set holdings. Data that supports demand-driven acquisition models will be automatically updated, making it simple for libraries to improve "just in time" collection development strategies.
"We are consistently looking for ways to simplify librarians' tasks by integrating within ProQuest and with other organizations," said Kevin Sayar, ProQuest senior vice president for workflow solutions. "This initiative has a dual benefit: it relieves the burden for librarians to maintain holdings and also enables more efficient marketing of collections by shortening the time between title availability and its discoverability. It's an important step in achieving the ultimate goal of completely seamless holdings management and future services such as Intota will expand on this concept, delivering even more value."
In addition to titles acquired through ebrary subscription and both businesses' perpetual archive models, Ebrary and EBL demand-driven titles will be automatically updated, simplifying access to ebooks within the Summon service, the most popular discovery layer. The Summon service has a track record of innovative collaborations that enable rich, precise discovery of library collections. The service is the first and only service to work directly with publishers to build a single, unified index for delivery of fast, unbiased search results.
Optimization of ebook processes is also occurring on another front at ProQuest as it creates a single, unparalleled ebook solution encompassing both Ebrary and EBL. Leveraging ebrary's and EBL's 24 years of combined experience helping libraries, publishers and researchers around the globe, the new solution will offer robust content selection, paired with the most flexible and innovative acquisition models. Libraries will have many options, making the best use of their budgets while effectively serving users.
Used by more than 700 libraries in more than 40 countries, the Summon service is the first and only discovery service based on a unified index of content, leveraging its unique match-and-merge technology to combine full text and rich metadata from multiple sources to ultimately make items more discoverable. In just three years, the Summon unified index has grown from 200 million items to more than one billion items -- with the vast majority of article and book content full-text searchable. Proven to increase usage of library resources, the Summon service consistently meets user expectations by delivering innovative new features for enhancing discovery.
More than 450,000 works that uniquely serve the research needs of students, scholars, business and industry professionals and other information seekers are available through the platforms renowned for flexibility and innovation, Ebrary and EBL.
More at www.proquest.com.
