Everything about Proquest totally explained
ProQuest LLC is an
Ann Arbor, Michigan-based company specializing in educational
microfilm and
electronic publishing.
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.
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. 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. The project when launched was overstated in scope, however.
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.
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.
Archived newspapers
Further Information
Get more info on 'Proquest'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://proquest.totallyexplained.com">ProQuest Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
