ProQuest LLC is an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based electronic publisher and microfilm publisher. It provides archives of sources such as newspapers, periodicals, dissertations, and aggregated databases of many types. Its content is estimated at 125 billion digital pages. Content is accessed most commonly through library internet gateways, with navigation through such search platforms as ProQuest, CSA Illumina, Dialog, Datastar, Chadwyck-Healey, eLibrary and SIRS. Microfilm publishing is under the UMI brand.
ProQuest is part of Cambridge Information Group.
History
Eugene Power, a 1930 M.B.A. graduate of the University of Michigan, 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.[1]
In his autobiography Edition of One, Power details the development of the company, including how University Microfilms assisted the OSS during World War II.[2] 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.
In the 1980s, UMI began producing CD-ROMs that stored databases of periodicals abstracts and indexes. The ProQuest brand name was first used for databases on CD-ROM. An online service called ProQuest Direct was launched in 1995; its name was later shortened to just ProQuest.[3] The bibliographic databases are mainly sold to schools, universities and libraries.
In 1999, the company name changed to Bell & Howell Information and Learning, and then 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. While work continues to digitize the contents of the microfilm vault, ProQuest is already providing navigation of 125 billion digital pages, including nearly 20 million pages of newspaper content dating from pre-Revolutionary War America.
ProQuest Information and Learning acquired Seattle start-up Serials Solutions, a venture providing access management and search services for content hosted by other companies, in 2004.
In 2004 ProQuest Information and Learning acquired Copley Publishing Group.[4]
ProQuest Company, then the parent company of ProQuest Information and Learning, sold it to Cambridge Information Group in 2006. ProQuest Information and Learning was merged with CSA in 2007 to form Proquest CSA. Later that year it was renamed ProQuest LLC.
In 2008, Proquest acquired Dialog, a major online database firm, from Thomson Reuters.[5][6]
Archived newspapers
See also
References
Further reading
- Eugene B. Power, Edition of One: The Autobiography of Eugene B. Power, Founder of University Microfilms, 1990 ISBN 0-8357-0898-5.
External links
