Databases Abound at ALA's Midwinter Meeting

The American Library Association's (ALA) Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia, January 11–16, brought numerous product announcements from tech vendors, which should be welcomed by librarians. Though veteran ILS producers were out in force, newcomers like open source provider LibLime had a large presence on the show floor. Everyone loves content, and ProQuest announced that it “plans to expand significantly the content searched by CSA Illustrata,” the vendor's digital research tool that mines journal illustrations and tables for hidden data.

The company said that CSA Illustrata will be expanded this spring “to offer a Technology collection [module], improving the quality of research on virtually any technological topic,” with key initial subject areas being aerospace, engineering, high tech, and materials science. The CSA Illustrata: Technology module will be sold separately from the Natural Sciences product, but both can be found on the Illumina platform, allowing subscribers to cross search.

Additionally, while ProQuest is one of the largest providers of print news archives through its Historical Newspapers program, the company also is expanding those horizons. ALA Midwinter brought word of a deal with Critical Mention, Inc., an international TV news firm, “to distribute its real-time TV and radio search engine.”

ProQuest will offer two versions, Critical Mention Basic, with access to U.S. networks and cable broadcast news, and Critical Mention Pro, offering the same domestic content plus access to “Middle Eastern, European, and Canadian channels and broadcasts, real-time radio, estimated Nielsen audience and publicity data, and additional reporting capabilities.”

The company also now has a free search widget for products on its platform, which permits “instant searching of most ProQuest platform databases on any page of a library or university web site.”

A late-breaking but significant piece of news, which oddly came post-ALA, is that ProQuest has bought RefWorks LLC, a web-based “research management, writing, and collaboration service for the academic and research communities.” ProQuest's parent, Cambridge Information Group, has been the majority owner of RefWorks since May 2001. The company said that full ownership will enable it “to integrate RefWorks into its Community of Science (COS) business—which serves the same market—creating powerful, single-source networking and management tools for scholars around the world.”

ProQuest VP/general manager Jeff Baer will head the merged RefWorks/COS. RefWorks CEO Earl Beutler will serve as a consultant to support strategic projects; the remaining senior management team will report directly to Baer. The other RefWorks staff will be combined with COS employees to create a single, integrated organization.