Information resources and technologies provider ProQuest, US, has named John Law to the newly created position of Vice President, Enterprise Product Strategy. In this role, Law will lead initiatives that enable coordination among ProQuest's business areas, leveraging the company's breadth of expertise and assets to create product and service innovations. He will be based in ProQuest's Ann Arbor headquarters.
Credited with the invention of the Summon service, Law has spent the past five years guiding it from initial development through its most recent advances as Vice-President of Discovery Services at Serials Solutions. The Summon service's genesis is in Law's landmark 'Student Research Behaviors Study,' which examined the discovery process and identified common barriers in access to library resources. The study provided critical information on the competitive advantages libraries hold, insights into how students choose databases, the most powerful influencers on those decisions and the environment in which students conduct research.
Prior to leading Discovery Services, Law managed the ProQuest platform, with responsibility for strategic planning, user research and definition of new features. He played a key role in the creation and implementation of ProQuest Smart Search, an advanced technology that has sustained a differentiated benefit, along with a variety of innovations supporting search and discovery.
Law is a popular speaker on topics related to technology, user-centered design of applications, and product development, both from a library market perspective and in relation to new product management practices.
