The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library has made a significant acquisition from ProQuest, a leading information service provider. The acquisition is the culmination of nearly two years of discussions between representatives from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the vendor. It was made possible through funding received from the Library’s endowment accounts, the state-supported subject funds allocated for acquisitions, and the University’s Library/IT fee, a mandatory fee paid by all students at Illinois designed to support quality and access in Library and IT resources and services.

This large-scale acquisition includes 46 electronic resources; one set of Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) Records to enhance access to the Library’s Gerritsen Collection of Aletta H. Jacobs, the greatest single source for the study of women’s history in the world; 40 microfilm titles of scarcely-held Slavic and Central Asian works; and seven other microfilm sets that focus on African-American, Native American, Latin American, and Jewish studies. Many of the microforms represent items rarely held outside of one or two institutions in the world. Several of the products acquired will not be accessible until their development is complete in 2013; however, all of the microfilm and almost all of the electronic resources (accessible through the University Library’s website) are available now.

“Overall, this acquisition represents a 16% increase in the total number of databases that we provide to our users, sets a firmer foundation to transform how users access historic dissertations from Illinois, and provides opportunities for partner institutions in Illinois that were unavailable just a few months ago,” said Associate University Librarian for Collections and Assistant Dean of Libraries Tom Teper.

New databases include resources supporting scholarship in African and African-American Studies; British Studies; Film, Fine Arts, and Performing Arts; Foreign Language Resources; Government and Law Resources; Historical Periodicals; Historical Resources; Newspapers (such as the New York Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Boston Globe); ProQuest Government Information Services Products; and Women’s Studies.

“This purchase is a major investment in humanities scholarship at Illinois. Our students and scholars now have access to millions of pages of primary source documents,” said Mary Stuart, head of the History, Philosophy and Newspaper Library. “The microfilm sets we acquired—such as the archives of the NAACP, U.S. diplomatic post records, and Russian provincial newspapers and Central Asian periodicals from the late 19th and early 20th centuries—will serve students and scholars engaged in highly specialized research.”

“Keyword searching unlocks this rich primary source material for a wide audience in ways that previously only a handful of dedicated full-time scholars could achieve. As the history librarian, I am very excited to see the ways in which digitization has revolutionized access to the historical record,” said Stuart.

In addition to acquiring resources locally, the negotiation provided an opportunity for the University Library to leverage its resources to receive favorable terms to complete a digitization project initiated several years ago. The University Library began working with ProQuest to digitize ProQuest’s holdings of dissertations from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. By the end of this extended project, the University Library will have almost every dissertation from the mid-1950s to 1997 digitized and deposited into IDEALS , a digital repository for research and scholarship developed at Illinois.