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ProQuest and OCLC have announced the launch of a data exchange program that will share metadata across OCLC’s Worldcat Local, ProQuest’s Summon service, and the full text of ProQuest Central and ebrary e-books, enriching discoverability for users of each of these services.
ProQuest on January 18 signed a definitive agreement to acquire Ebook Library (EBL), the companies announced today. They plan to merge EBLs platform with ebrary, which ProQuest acquired in January 2011. In a statement to the press, ProQuest CEO Kurt Sanford said that the company viewed EBL’s business models and acquisition tools as complementary to ebrary’s core platform technology, subscription service, and content selection.
The eMOP project led by Texas A&M will use page images from ProQuest’s Early English Books Online and Early European Books, Gale Cengage’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and other sources to create a database of early typefaces used in English books and documents, and then train optical character recognition (OCR) software to read these documents.
Begun back in 2001 by O’Reilly Media and Pearson Education, Safari Books Online was something of a pioneer. It now contains some 25,000 ebook and video titles from more than 75 publishers, with new publishers added regularly. Its main strength is its specificity: rather than try to cover every possible subject, Safari Books Online concentrates largely on technology, business, and especially programming, on a subscription basis.
Online digital library ebrary has launched two new subscription database products focusing on Employee Development and Human Resources. Featuring a selection of titles geared toward corporate libraries, the Employee Development database includes ebooks and digital resources covering topics including business communication, strategic thinking, and business creativity, while the Human Resources collection focuses on topics such as employee recruitment, diversity, retention and remuneration, training and development, and corporate culture.
ProQuest announced this week that it was moving to a new structure consisting of six “strategic business units,” including one comprised of its Serials Solutions and Bowker businesses. The new arrangement, according to the announcement, was created by CEO Kurt Sanford, who joined the company in July.
