Information resources and technologies provider ProQuest, US, has announced that it has been ranked 65th in the 2011 InformationWeek 500, an annual listing of the nation's most innovative users of business technology. ProQuest is best known for its creation of information and technology tools that support research.
InformationWeek is a premier source of news and analysis of leading-edge products and vendors in the business IT industry. Its InformationWeek 500 list is considered unique among industry rankings for its spotlight on the power of innovation in information technology.
This is ProQuest's third consecutive appearance in the top 100 of the InfoWeek 500. The company is being recognised for its ability to navigate a highly competitive industry, where new market entrants come from non-traditional sources. ProQuest has continued to thrive through the development of services that enable researchers to discover, interact and use content. Particularly noted is the company's engagement in partnerships that accelerate discovery of information that is often below the search radar.
Earlier this year, ProQuest's business unit Serials Solutions' Summon service partnered with HathiTrust, a digital archive of more than 8 million books common to academic libraries, to enable instant searching of these works - even those in print - down to the word on a page. This is an important step since books have been searched by their metadata - author, title, keywords, et cetera. Information that was buried can now be surfaced in a simple search.
The judges also noted ProQuest's acquisition of and investment in companies with specialized technologies that benefit research communities. Earlier this year, ProQuest acquired ebook company ebrary. This union creates a uniquely comprehensive research content pool supported with data management tools. ProQuest also acquired LexisNexis' Library Research Solutions, now ProQuest Government Information Systems (GIS).
Within months, ProQuest announced a project that will digitise the vast library of primary sources from GIS, enabling users to easily access and search historical government documents - from presidential memos to congressional reports - that have been confined to archive boxes and microfilm, but will now be easily studied online.
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