ProQuest to Distribute Arabia Inform's AskZad
ProQuest will serve the growing demand for authoritative information related to the Middle East through a groundbreaking distribution agreement with Arabia Inform, the premier digital publisher, content generator and media analyst from and about this dynamic region. ProQuest will distribute Arabia Inform's AskZad, the world's largest Arabic digital reference database, which comprises 500 million pages of content, including 25,000 hard-to-find digitized books. ProQuest has been chosen as AskZad's global distributor to academic libraries.
"This agreement is an important building block in ProQuest's mission to be central to global research," said Marty Kahn, CEO of ProQuest. "We're seeing a tremendous demand for in-depth information related to the Middle East, and Arabia Inform is a natural partner for us. It's a highly-credible source and it delivers exactly what researchers expect from ProQuest: top quality, unique content with academic authority." "We've been striving for years to make progress with digital publishing in the Middle East, and this challenge has been ndash; and is still ndash; tough," says Amr El-Menshawy, AskZad's Manager. Mohamed Eliwa, founder and CEO of Arabia Inform agrees, "Now is time to share these achievements with the world. We believe that ProQuest is the perfect strategic partner to bring AskZad, the World's Gateway to Middle East e-Content, to students and researchers around the globe, providing them instant access to the rich knowledge of the Middle East."
Arabia Inform is noted for its exhaustive coverage, collecting diverse content related to the Middle East in many world languages. This fits with ProQuest's mission to broaden access to global information, fueling innovation through research. AskZad is one of the group's flagship products and is designed specifically for university libraries and research centers. Its primarily Arabic content is supported with metadata in both English and Arabic. It includes almost 1,000 academic journals (with nearly 250 in full image and more than 160,000 indexed articles), over 7,000 dissertations and complete conference proceedings from 50 academic and scientific conferences. Libraries will also have access to the Pan Arab News Index, which includes nearly 120 newspapers with both print and web editions, 600 online Arabic news sources, 500 online English sources and other sources in six languages.
The agreement is part of ProQuest's larger initiative to expand international content, meeting the changing needs of researchers across geographical boundaries.
About Arabia Inform (www.arabiainform.com)
Arabia Inform is a pioneer provider of electronic content in the Middle East and a regional leader of Arabic content documentation and analysis. The company serves professionals in the fields of education, research, government, media, e-culture and business intelligence, with offices in Cairo, Dubai, Riyadh, and Washington, DC. It specializes in providing creative solutions to its clients, giving them the much-needed edge in this rapidly advancing world of academic research and media intelligence.
Since 1997, it has supplied detailed monitoring, indexing, and analysis services for Arabic print media, followed by the 2003 addition of academic and scientific content and web-based sources. In 2008, Middle East Monitor included broadcast sources. It has its own proprietary indexing system that allows clients to find information quickly, with bilingual interface and full text human translation upon request.
Its sister company, Almotahida Group, was the first in the region to offer multimedia e-tutorials through the Bayan series in 1997. In 1998, Arabia Inform launched moheet.com, the world's first Arabic language news website.
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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.
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