ProQuest Employees Wrap Up Another "Summer of Service"

In 2009, a team of volunteers at ProQuest responded to the American Library Association’s national call for a "Summer of Service" with a volunteer program to support local libraries. In the years since, the company has resumed the program "Live, Learn, Laugh, Love Your Library" each summer. As this year's program concluded, a celebration at the company’s Ann Arbor headquarters honored 55 volunteers for their 13 projects at community libraries.

The 2011 ProQuest Library Volunteer program — run entirely by employees — identified project opportunities with seven organizations, including the Ann Arbor District Library, Chelsea District Library, Ypsilanti District Library, as well as schools including the University of Michigan, Ypsilanti Public Schools and the Community Action Network’s Perry Nursery School.

In nearly 200 hours of work, volunteers tackled projects ranging from weeding, tagging and organizing hundreds books and multimedia works in the Ann Arbor District Library, to outfitting low-income children with backpacks, books and breakfast at the Perry Nursery School and the Community Action Network, to digitizing local history sources at the Chelsea District Library.

"Getting linked up with your own library is important," said Stanley Bowling, a content analyst who works with ProQuest's Historical Newspapers collection and shared his expertise with the Chelsea District Library, scanning its historical works. "While I know I don't have to ‘pay’ for borrowing books/movies, it feels good to pay back something to the library for all the time my family and I spend there."

ProQuest has a history of advocacy in support of libraries and its local communities around the world. The company encourages community give-back by enabling every employee to spend two full, paid days per year at the volunteer program of their choice.

About ProQuest (www.proquest.com)
ProQuest connects people with vetted, reliable information. Key to serious research, the company has forged a 70-year reputation as a gateway to the world's knowledge — from dissertations to governmental and cultural archives to news, in all its forms. Its role is essential to libraries and other organizations whose missions depend on the delivery of complete, trustworthy information.

ProQuest's massive information pool is accessible through the all-new ProQuest^® platform, which moves beyond navigation to empower researchers to use, create, and share content—accelerating research productivity.

This energetic, fast-growing organization includes the Summon^™ web-scale discovery service, the new ProQuest Dialog^™ service, and business units ebrary^®, Serials Solutions^®, RefWorks-COS^™, and Bowker^®.