Nov

ProQuest Works to Improve eBook Discoverability

According to the results of its own study, ProQuest, the parent company over several divisions that support digital reading, cited discoverability as one of the most often mentioned factors that prevented respondents from using ebooks.

“Our 2011 Global Student E-book Survey identified discovery as an area of the e-book experience that could be substantially improved,” said Kurt Sanford, ProQuest CEO, in a press release. “More than 47 percent of respondents reported that they aren’t using e-books because they don’t know where to find them. With all of ebrary’s titles indexed within Summon, researchers and faculty can now more efficiently discover them, enabling the library to earn more value from its e-book collection.”

ProQuest is now making the full-text of some 400,000 ebooks available for searching in the Summon Discovery Service. This service, launched last year by Serials Solutions, will now enable researchers to search a database of full-texts, rather than just searching titles based on tags or keywords. This will give a more complete look at digital titles by topic, but will also streamline the acquisition process for users from research libraries who retrieve content through Proquest’s ebrary division.

Mercy Pilkington (1126 Posts)

Mercy Pilkington is a young-adult author and a teacher in a correctional facility. She does not have a single textbook in her classroom. With the top-of-the-line technology at her disposal and the low reading ability of many of her students, there’s no need for standard paper texts. Instead she relies on e-readers, iPads, desktop PCs, Polycom video conferencing equipment for virtual field trips, live streaming for science demonstrations, and text-to-speech read-aloud software to teach English and science. Within the next ten years, public school classrooms across the country are going to look a lot more like Mercy’s classroom because the educational possibilities with these kinds of technologies are limitless. Have a question? Send an email to mercypilkington@yahoo.com