A Closer Look At: How ProQuest Curates Ebook Subscriptions

In this post—and in future updates—we aim to clarify what’s changing and what isn’t, and, most importantly, reaffirm our commitment to supporting academic libraries.

Building On A 20-Year Tradition of Curated Subscriptions

For more than two decades, ProQuest has curated ebook subscriptions for libraries seeking access to extensive catalogs of high-quality, multidisciplinary scholarly ebook content. Building on this tradition, we recently introduced ProQuest Ebooks, our most comprehensive subscription, offering access to 700,000 trusted titles that can support students' academic success and well-being. ProQuest Ebooks joins our portfolio of ebook subscriptions, including Academic Complete, subject collections and interdisciplinary collections such as the Sustainability and Mental Health ebook subscriptions. These subscriptions serve as an affordable foundation for a library’s collection and remain complementary to perpetual frontlist purchasing.

Over the past few weeks, many of you have asked us how we developed ProQuest Ebooks, what content is included and our criteria for selecting titles. Read on for a closer look at how ProQuest Ebooks was developed.

Curated By Librarians, With Quality and Relevancy At the Forefront

ProQuest Ebooks is curated by a team of in-house librarians with a combined total of over 100 years of library experience. It has been created with the same mission as our other ebook subscriptions: deliver seamless, uninterrupted access to high-quality content to users on Ebook Central—anytime, anywhere. While our other subscriptions, such as Academic Complete, offer supplementary resources for the library’s collection, ProQuest Ebooks is a broad, comprehensive solution that supports research, teaching and learning on a greater scale, covering a wide range of subjects and disciplines.

Leigh Wright, MLIS and Product Manager at Clarivate, is one of the many librarians involved in curating ebook subscriptions. She said, “Ultimately, we want to ensure that the ebooks we’re selecting for this subscription are going to be relevant to students and researchers. ProQuest Ebooks contains something for everyone in the sense that we’re covering all areas and levels of study. However, within that scope, we’re focusing on materials that will be highest in demand, ensuring that libraries see good usage and a return on their investment in ProQuest Ebooks.”

To create a subscription of 700,000+ titles, our team focuses on four key areas:

• • Building on Academic Complete with even more scholarly content. ProQuest Ebooks includes the same ten core disciplines as Academic Complete: Arts, Business, Education, History, Health & Medicine, Law, Literature & Language, Religion & Philosophy, Science & Technology, and Social Science. We add even more trusted content in these subject areas, aiming for broad disciplinary coverage, representing all levels of scholarly study.
  • Aligning with research and curriculum needs. We ensure our subjects match curricula, emerging research areas, new majors and minors, and graduation statistics for top degrees conferred. Our team uses resources such as Hanover Research, the National Center for Education Statistics, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Canadian Centre for Education Statistics, the UK Government’s Education and Training Statistics, the Web of Science, and more to help map our selection decisions. We also look closely at usage data to ensure quality and relevancy for students and researchers.
  • Supporting trending subject areas. Our librarians are always keeping an ear out for topics that are trending in colleges and universities. Examples of trending areas include research methods and study skills, interdisciplinary topics such as sustainability, various area studies such as Indigenous peoples and disability studies, and unsurprisingly, artificial intelligence.
  • Fostering academic and personal growth. We have expanded content in leisure reading and general interest to provide holistic support for students and researchers, including more titles around health and wellness, personal finance, hobbies and career development.

Notable and Award-Winning Content From Around the World

ProQuest Ebooks features content from over 4,000 publishers, including more than 290 University Presses, smaller and niche publishers, and other academic publishers of all sizes that are renowned in their field. Libraries will also find trade publishers and some publishers of vocational content to support students’ personal interests and professional endeavours.

ProQuest Ebooks features a variety of international publishers, representing over 80 countries, and we continue to partner with more global publishers. At present, ProQuest Ebooks includes 190,000+ titles in over 60 non-English languages. This number will continue to grow as the subscription is continuously updated.

Libraries utilize notable and award-winning title lists for collection development, so we strive to include more of them in our subscriptions. ProQuest Ebooks includes over 87,000 notable and award-winning titles, which includes CHOICE Outstanding Academic Titles, Books Citation Index titles, Resources for College Libraries titles, DOODY’s Core Titles, and titles from Library Journal starred reviews.

Guided By Community Feedback

Through Customer Advisory Board meetings, consultations and direct customer suggestions, we gather important feedback on what content should be included in our subscriptions. Our team reviews each request closely and makes every attempt to secure that content. Wright offered an example, “One of our Canadian libraries recommended an Indigenous publisher, Indigenous Corporate Training. In response to the library’s recommendation, we worked with the publisher to secure their content in Academic Complete. They are a small publisher with very high-quality content, and they are just one example of our commitment to diversity of content and publishers of all sizes.”

Finally, to enable more community consultation, we are launching a librarian engagement group focusing on content curation to provide strategic guidance into the development of our subscriptions and help ensure they reflect wide-ranging academic needs.

Continually Updated to Support Evolving Research Areas

ProQuest Ebooks will be reviewed and updated to keep the collection current and relevant, with new content added four times a year. We utilize our curation best practices when updating our subscriptions, looking closely at trending subject areas and global usage, with a focus on breadth of publishers, award-winning and notable titles and content from around the world.

As a standard practice across the academic industry, there are times when publishers remove content from subscriptions. To minimize disruption as much as possible, we maintain a schedule of title removals from subscriptions. These removals are communicated in advance, and we provide libraries with a list of titles to be removed, which can be purchased from other publishers or aggregators if desired. There may be occasional off-cycle removals due to legal reasons or loss of publisher rights. We are actively working with our library and publisher partners to optimize the title removals frequency.

Supporting Your Library’s Collection Strategy

ProQuest offers a variety of complimentary tools and custom reports to help you make data-driven collection decisions. Through a Title Matching Fast report, we can compare a library’s holdings to our catalog of electronic content to understand how much of their existing collection is included in our subscriptions—and how much additional content they would receive. Libraries who subscribe to ProQuest Ebooks or any other Ebook Central subscription also have access to comprehensive usage reporting in LibCentral on top-used titles, publishers, subject areas and more to help demonstrate return on their investment and inform future collection decisions.

Natasha Edmonds, Director, Industry & Publisher Strategy at Clarivate and CILIP accredited librarian, said, “Through these reports, we can see that many libraries have sizeable overlap with their DDA pools. This tells us that the content in ProQuest Ebooks aligns with the selection and curation strategies of libraries worldwide, enabling them to best support their researchers and end users.”

With its large selection of titles across a wide range of subject areas and levels of study, all available at unlimited access, this single subscription can provide a strong foundation for a library’s collection. Edmonds notes, “If a subscription can help librarians provide users with access to a good percentage of the titles they need in one transaction, that will free up time for other collection development projects – or other initiatives within the library’s mission.”

To request a title list for ProQuest Ebooks, please contact us.

If you are interested in joining our community engagement group, please contact us.