ANN ARBOR — ProQuest, the Ann Arbor-based information aggregator, has announced the rollout of a single comprehensive search for news, journal articles, dissertations, documentaries, videos and more for its ProQuest and Academic Video Online services.
“This integration puts vetted, authoritative videos that are aligned with curricula into the research workflow of the student,” said Allan Lu, ProQuest vice president for reserach tools, services, and platforms. “It’s a particularly important advancement as video is playing an increasingly significant role in the learning experience.”
Visual education aids like video are being embraced in both classroom and in research as studies show their impact on improving learning outcomes. Searching text and video in one place enables users of all kinds to find the breadth of reliable content they need faster, shifting their time from the hunt for information to analysis and learning.
“Video brings a subject to life in a way that more traditional formats can’t,” said David Parker, who leads video licensing for Academic Video Online’s Premium service. “This integration pairs it with high quality text, providing an exceptionally rich research experience.”
The ProQuest platform is the foundation for hundreds of ProQuest’s most popular resources for researchers and faculty, with an extraordinary range of content types. Interoperability with Alexander Street’s Academic Video Online will enable users to discover all the library’s ProQuest platform content along with more than 50,000 video titles spanning essential subject areas including anthropology, business, counseling, film, health, history, music and others.
“Our goal is to provide the most efficient knowledge discovery solution to inspire research and learning,” Lu said. “This is an important step forward, and the first in many we have planned to help researchers get the best possible outcomes.”
ProQuest services include ProQuest, Alexander Street, Bowker, Dialog, Ex Libris and SIPX, as well as research tools such as the RefWorks citation and reference management platform, the Pivot research development tool and the Ebook Central, ebrary, EBL and MyiLibrary ebook platforms. More at www.proquest.com.