Media Studies Research Gets Boost from ProQuest

ProQuest will accelerate serious research into 20th century popular culture with the creation of the digital Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive. For the first time, researchers will be able to explore every edition, cover-to-cover of nearly 30 major entertainment trade and consumer magazines in a single online search. The Archive’s 2.5 million full-color pages will be accessible in the ProQuest research environment, enabling it to be easily searched, managed, shared and used to create new content.

"Scholars have an increasing interest in the study of popular culture, but the research can be difficult," said Stephen Brooks, Senior Publisher at ProQuest. "Many of the most important 20th century chronicles of the entertainment industry have never been adequately indexed to support serious research. That problem is solved with this archive. It's a huge leap forward in the ability to explore life and times in the 20th century."

Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive's collection of 20th century U.S. and U.K. magazines spans the full range of performing arts and media, including film, television, popular music, radio, theatre and the entertainment industry. Included are trades such as Billboard, Variety and The Stage — essential reading for industry insiders — along with consumer titles such as IPC Media's Picturegoer and Film Weekly, which reflect the public's enduring love affair with motion pictures in the past century. A total of ten influential IPC Media titles are being digitized and put online by ProQuest, including New Musical Express (NME) and Melody Maker, widely considered publications of record for the development and reception of popular music and home to some of the most exciting writing in the field.

ProQuest's signature crisp, digital full-page images are supported with sophisticated tagging and indexing that enables article-level searching, making it as easy to explore the impact of "Birth of a Nation" in Variety as it is to plot the emergence of the rave scene in Mixmag.

Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive will be available from ProQuest in 2012. To learn more visit www.proquest.com.

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^®.