In Major Deal, EBSCO Publishing Acquires H.W. Wilson Company

EBSCO Publishing acquired the venerable H.W. Wilson company late Wednesday. Financial details of the transaction were not available. EBSCO Publishing executives met with the Wilson team at their headquarters in the Bronx, NY, and a series of meetings will be held between management teams today and Friday, and more over the coming weeks.

Wilson operates a similar business to EBSCO offering abstract/index records and fulltext databases via its proprietary platform, Wilson Web, but it is a much smaller company with about 200 employees and sales that are less than 10 percent of EBSCO's.

Databases from Wilson will be integrated with EBSCOhost over the coming months, and, eventually, the WilsonWeb platform will be eliminated, the companies said in a press release. EBSCO will maintain WilsonWeb until all Wilson databases are available on EBSCOhost and customers have been transitioned to EBSCOhost. The company anticipates maintaining the platform until December 2011. Customers of databases on WilsonWeb will be given concurrent access to databases on both platforms as these become available

All Wilson indexing, abstracts, and full text will be fully searchable via EBSCO Discovery Service for subscribers of Wilson databases.

The Wilson subject thesaurus and Wilson "names" authority file are highly regarded, and the Wilson controlled vocabularies will be integrated into EBSCO's controlled vocabularies, which could result in improved subject indexing for EBSCO databases.

"Upholding the integrity of the Wilson indexing is essential, and extending these attributes to EBSCOhost resources is a critical part of this venture," Tim Collins, President of EBSCO Publishing, said in the press release. "When it comes to thesauri (subjects and names), and how these are leveraged, Wilson has long been an industry leader. We look forward to bringing this value and approach to all applicable EBSCOhost databases and are excited about the benefits this will bring to EBSCOhost users. We are also pleased to be able to add the Wilson databases into the EBSCO Discovery Service search experience."

In an email to EBSCO employees announcing the deal, Collins wrote that, "This acquisition adds a meaningful amount of sales to EP and strengthens our leadership position in the academic marketplace, adding leading databases such as HWW's Art Abstracts to our product portfolio. We also add a leading biography database and a series of collection development publications to EP, which are important to our school and public library efforts. We also add a legal information database, which enhances our position in the corporate marketplace."

"As a company, Wilson has focused heavily on the quality of our indexing and how it impacts the search experience," said Wilson's Vice President of Indexing & Editorial Services, Mark Gauthier. "With EBSCOhost full-text and abstract/index databases, along with EBSCO Discovery Service, EBSCO is really focusing on detailed editorial value to truly take its services to new levels. We're excited about the possibilities and what we can do together to benefit the research experience for libraries."

All current subscriptions to Wilson print books will be fulfilled. An FAQ sheet is available here.