ProQuest To Launch Unified Content Platform
Move designed to simplify resource administration and research experience
Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 7/6/2009
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- New platform will offer single sign on
- Will complement Summon discovery platform
- Launch planned for 2010
ProQuest has officially announced plans to unify its content platform with a single sign-on and improve search across its vast stores of content and databases. Initially, the company will integrate content from ProQuest, CSA Illumina, and select elements of the Chadwyck-Healey humanities and social sciences databases; later, content will be added from the company’s UMI Dissertation publishing line and others. According to company reps, the launch of the actual platform is tentatively scheduled for early 2010.
The move is in line with what many analysts have predicted since the announcement of the Cambridge Information Group’s acquisition of ProQuest in late 2006. Indeed, Mary Sauer Games, VP of publishing, said that intensive user research began in 2007 with observations of student strategies. Then came a survey of students and researchers in 2008 eliciting about 6000 responses on research habits, said Bipin Patel, ProQuest CIO, which pointed toward the need for a single platform still flexible enough to serve specific needs of all researchers, undergrad through postgrad.
The new platform will also complement ProQuest subsidiary Serials Solutions’ new Summon discovery interface, which is making its commercial debut at ALA. Whereas Summon is geared more toward broad but shallow exploratory research, the unified ProQuest will focus on enabling researchers to “delve more deeply,” said Games.
According to Patel, a single content platform gives the company significantly more options in terms of search indexing and data normalization—features that translate into more faceted refinements for user searches and important cross-connections among formerly siloed contents. The aggregated back end will feature more than “half a billion documents” to start, Patel said. For librarians, "the unified platform will offer new administrative and reporting tools" to simplify institutional customization, according to today's announcment.
“Agile” development model
In preparation for the unified platform, ProQuest has shfited toward what it calls an “agile methodology” for development. Under this model, developers place their primary focus on incremental software updates achievable in two- to three-week “sprints.” New goals are then set at the conclusion of these short-term development cycles. Patel said that the flexibility this model provides will play a primary role in quickly incorporating end user feedback into the development of the unified content platform.
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