CALIS (China Academic Library and Information System) recently hosted its annual conference on May 12, 2015, in Shanghai.
Imported resources from overseas are one of the most important parts of library construction. Since 2002, CALIS (China Academic Library and Information System) has successfully hosted an annual conference to help member libraries comprehensively understand the developing trends of the field and to learn how to best choose and utilize these resources. The conference has become one of the most influential events in Chinese library field.
During the recent CALIS annual conference, Allan Lu, VP of ProQuest research tools, services, and platform, presented to nearly 500 librarians. His presentation, 'Maximizing Library Resource Utilization with Platform Innovations and Leading Business Models,' touched on recent improvements ProQuest has implemented to improve the user experience, how the company continues to support libraries and what's next.
Allan opened the presentation by sharing how through responsive design, ProQuest has improved the user experience (UX) by consolidating platforms and increasing platform interoperability through single-sign-on. Additionally, as one of the largest content aggregators with 2-3 billion documents (3-4 petabytes of content), ProQuest is taking steps toward breaking down barriers to content, and enabling services from different sources to work together by teaming with OCLC, Ex Libris and Google Scholar.
Discovery has always played an integral part of ProQuest's pursuit to drive better outcomes for libraries and their patrons and these partnerships help to ensure content is simple to discover and use. Enter Summon® and 360 Link as best practices for patrons to search and discover the library and web resources, Allan discussed how 360 Link provides the most accurate, up-to-date results for resolving full-text items. He also shared how ProQuest pioneered Summon® as the first academic discovery product to deliver comprehensive, neutral, and truly relevance-ranked search results from a single index that treats each record identically – no matter the source.
Summon has 2.1 billion documents, helping more than 700 academic libraries in 40 countries optimize their discovery services. Allan continued by revealing how ProQuest introduced the DDA model in both ebrary and EBL via multiple methods, revolutionising library book acquisition. Highlighting how libraries can benefit from a DDA model, Allan shared an EBL example in use at the library at the University of Denver, emphasising how the model can save the library money while increasing their ebook holdings.
To conclude the session, Allan previewed what's new in research and development of new products and services to support digital or scholarly commons. He shared how ProQuest is working with the University of Michigan on their Digital Media Commons program by supporting their advanced training labs, audio studio rooms, design labs, electronic music studio, multimedia workrooms, podcasting room, 3D lab, video studio and more. Similarly, ProQuest is collaborating with the University of Illinois by supporting the copyrights, data management, data services, digital humanities and digitization aspects of their Scholarly Commons.
Interested parties may view the full presentation, 'Maximizing Library Resource Utilization with Platform Innovations and Leading Business Models' online.
