Serials Solutions Announces Unicode Compliance
Serials Solutions, a business unit of ProQuest Information and Learning, announced that it will release Unicode compliant versions of its electronic resource collection management tools at the annual International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) 72nd Congress to be held this month in Seoul, Korea.
"Unicode compliance is the cornerstone of Serials Solutions’ Internationalization Project," said Jane Burke, Serials Solutions general manager and vice-president of ProQuest Information and Learning. "Customer demand for Serials Solutions products has built this company into a leader in providing software for libraries to manage their electronic resources. Now, we’re seeing growing interest in these services outside of North America. As a result, we’re developing superior ways to serve the non-English language markets. Interest in Serials Solutions products has been particularly strong in Asia and Unicode compliance is essential for the meaningful display of Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters."
With Unicode compliance, Serials Solutions’ E- Journal Portal (EJP™), a hosted electronic journal management solution, and Article Linker™, the company’s OpenURL link resolver, can process journal titles and library holdings information in any left-right reading language. Libraries are able to input local title and holdings for their non-English left-right reading collections and give users access to these titles through EJP™ and Article Linker™.
Serials Solutions will create E-Journal Portal™ and Article Linker™ User Interface translations for Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Finnish, Italian, and Turkish, with other languages to be added over time. Serials Solutions will work with libraries who wish to customize their own user interfaces in any language—including Chinese, Japanese or Korean.
Central Search™, Serials Solutions’ federated search engine, is also Unicode compliant and can match text in any Unicode left-to-right reading database. If a library user is searching on a computer with an appropriate language pack installed, the search string will be in entered Unicode and match whatever Unicode text is present in the Serials Solutions Knowledge Base™.
"We are pleased to release the Unicode-compliant versions of Serials Solutions’ products concurrently with the World Library and Information 72rd IFLA Congress," said Burke. "Serials Solutions serves a global community of libraries with multicultural users and multilingual collections. It is imperative that our systems be able to process the characters and symbols used to represent language information in all written forms. The Serials Solutions Internationalization Project takes us an important step closer to satisfying the diverse and sophisticated information needs of our customers." "
Demonstrations of Serials Solutions internationalization features will be available at the ProQuest Information and Learning booth at IFLA 2006 in Seoul, Korea.
About Serials Solutions
Serials Solutions, part of ProQuest Information and Learning, is the industry-leader providing complete e-resource access and management solutions to over 1700 libraries worldwide. Founded by a librarian for librarians, Serials Solutions helps librarians and patrons find and use electronic content through its Access & Management Suite™ (AMS), Full MARC Records™ service for e-journals, Article Linker™ - Serials Solutions’ comprehensive OpenURL link resolver, Central Search™ - a powerful federated search engine, and ERMS™ - a lifecycle manager for electronic subscriptions.
About ProQuest Information and Learning
ProQuest Information and Learning, a division of ProQuest Company, is a world leader in collecting, organizing, and publishing information worldwide for researchers, faculty, and students in libraries and schools. Known widely for its strength in business and economics, general reference, genealogy, humanities, social sciences, and STM content, the company develops premium databases comprising periodicals, newspapers, dissertations, out-of-print books, and other scholarly information from more than 9,000 publishers worldwide. Users access the information through the ProQuest® Web-based online information system, Chadwyck-Healey™ electronic and microform resources, UMI® microform and print reference products, eLibrary®, SIRS® and Serials Solutions resource management resources. ProQuestSmart® Search was named "Best Specialist Search Product" by the International Information Industry Awards in late 2005. For more information about ProQuest Information and Learning, visit www.il.proquest.com.