Information resources and technologies provider ProQuest, US, is boosting the visibility of e-books in library collections by providing for the full text of an additional 400,000 e-books to be discovered and accessed as part of a broad search of library holdings.
The initiative to improve e-book visibility began in early 2011 when Serials Solutions pioneered indexing of the contents of the HathiTrust collection in its Summon discovery service. Just months later, ProQuest debuted the first full-text indexing of ebrary's popular collection of e-books. Now, ProQuest expands that effort with virtually every title in ebrary's collection richly indexed in the Summon service and discoverable from the 'front door' of the library.
The Summon service searches across all of a library's ebrary products, encompassing titles acquired through subscription, patron driven acquisition, short-term loan, and perpetual archive models. As a result, strategic acquisition can occur within the ebrary platform but can start from the library's point of discovery, dramatically streamlining ordering and precisely tuning the library's holdings to users' needs.
Used by more than 500 libraries in more than 40 countries, the Summon service claims to be the first and only discovery service based on a unified index of content, leveraging its unique "match and merge" technology to combine rich metadata and full text from multiple sources to ultimately make items more discoverable. In just three years, the Summon unified index has grown from 200 million items to more than one billion items — with the vast majority of article and book content full-text searchable.
