E-Views and Reviews: ProQuest's Hits and Misses

HAPI Talk The Hispanic American Periodicals Index (HAPI) Online has undergone a major redesign resulting in a streamlined yet powerful interface. It is an excellent resource for research on Central and South America, Mexico, the Caribbean, the U.S.-Mexican border, and Latinos in the United States, with nearly 300,000 citations from over 275 academic journals and over 34,000 full-text links.

In a Perfect Online World, multiple publishers would coproduce a product that's better than what each could produce singly. I weep at the waste when several good producers bring separate, similar products to market, offering complementary content. To attain access to all of it, libraries must subscribe to several products, or just go without, making painful choices. Let's hope publishers will foresee the positive effects—and profits!—collaborations can bring about.

Quote of the Week “SAGE is committed to partnering with librarians to develop products that meet the changing needs of customers. Both libraries and publishers...are under attack, and we believe...in the value of editorial selection and rigorous quality control. Our objective is to couple these unchanging values with emerging technology radically to transform and enhance user experience. Our new platform, SAGE eReference (launching in January 2007), is a great example of the power of combining authoritative content with cutting-edge technology.” —Alison Mudditt, Executive VP, SAGE

ProQuest Historical Annual Reports
ProQuest Obituaries
www.il.proquest.com

ProQuest Historical Annual Reports (PHAR) is a collection of annual reports for 800 U.S. companies dating from 1884 to the present. ProQuest Obituaries (PO) is a database of over ten million names listed in obituaries and death notices from major national newspapers dating back to 1849.

How Do They Work? PHAR's interface will be familiar to ProQuest users: do a Basic search, an Advanced search, locate a company in a list of Publications, and manage/keep search results in a variety of ways through a “My Research” section. PO's interface lets you search by Name and Keyword, or limit by a date or date range or to a particular publication (e.g., Los Angeles Times, Washington Post).

Can You & Your Patrons Use Them? My first search of PHAR was a Basic search for “Mattel,” locating 48 documents. The citation for the first report, from 1961, provided loads of information, including Classification Codes, Locations, People, Product Names, Auditor, and more. Good stuff, but the PDF full-text of the annual report was an even better gold mine of company information since it went public in June 1960. Digitized text here was superb, but the illustrations were pretty grainy. Companies covered range from Allegheny International to Macmillan to Zellerbach Corporation. Hewlett-Packard, General Motors, and General Mills are here, but Apple and Microsoft are not (Microsoft's annual reports from 1996 through 2005 are available on its web site).

My search for Eleanor Roosevelt in PO yielded 165 results ranging from 1898 to 1994. Some included a name (but Eleanor Roosevelt was not listed), while a disconcertingly large number of results were listed only as “Obituary 1 – No title” or “Deaths” or “In Memoriam.” I thought Eleanor Roosevelt passed away in the early 1960s, but I would have to click through 25-plus unidentified records to locate relevant hits. So I went to another source to learn that she died on November 7, 1962, and then I reexamined the results list. There were six listings actually for Eleanor Roosevelt; five from the New York Times and one from the Los Angeles Times, with multiple death notices in most of them posted by various organizations.

Other searches in PO included Fiorello LaGuardia (222 results with none giving his name); Hirohito (34 listings but none for Hirohito himself); Billie Holiday (found three obituaries, two listing her name); and Cesar Chavez (found four obituaries, but none gave his name).

How Good Are They? Both products have a number of strengths and weaknesses. PHAR is a treasure trove of historical company information. Although its coverage is not exhaustive, it is fully searchable. However, the cost may be steep, so it gets a 9 (if coverage expands, the rating would go up). PO undeniably has useful content, but you have to work for it more than should be necessary. It gets a 7.5.

What's the Cost? PHAR is sold as a purchase with an annual access fee, and pricing depends on the size of the population served, number of branches, and whether a library subscribes to other ProQuest products. For example, a non-ARL library serving a community of 15,000 would purchase for $15,000, with an annual fee of $1500. Pricing for PO works the same way and starts at $800 per year.

The Bottom Line ProQuest Historical Annual Reports is highly recommended for library collections serving American history and corporate history researchers; ProQuest Obituaries is recommended with reservations for comprehensive genealogy collections.