Serials Solutions Summon™ Service to Include Metadata from Prestigious German Library Consortium
Serials Solutions®, a business unit of ProQuest® LLC, announced today it has signed an agreement with the German library consortium Gemeinsamer Bibliotheks Verbund (GBV) to index the vast amount of German-language metadata catalogued by participating consortium libraries in the Summon™ web-scale discovery service. With more than 34 million library catalog records, GBV's union catalog contains valuable content from all areas of research including physics, science, humanities and mathematics.
"Serials Solutions has been working hard to ramp up the discoverability of native language content available in Germany, and the GBV is very important to this effort," said Mike Buschman, director of product management for the Summon™ service at Serials Solutions. "By making the holdings of the GBV discoverable, we are ensuring that their collections are being fully exposed and utilized by researchers. This is a win-win situation for everyone."
Located in Göttingen, GBV is the library network of seven German federal states including Bremen, Hamburg, Mecklenbur-Vorpommern, Niedersachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt, Schleswig-Holstein, Thüringen and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. GBV is a cataloguing and service-oriented consortium of more than 430 academic, public and research institute libraries within the above mentioned territories, as well as the Staatsbibliothek Berlin, and other public and special libraries outside of the GBV.
"The extensive holdings that the member libraries of the GBV possess provide valuable information to the researchers they serve," said Reiner Diedrichs, Director of the Head Office of the GBV (VZG). "By making our metadata available through the Summon service, we are partnering on our shared mission to ensure that our information is readily discoverable and used to its maximum potential among our consortium members."
This agreement is another example of how Serials Solutions continues to deliver on its promise to enable ease of discovery of the full-breadth of a library's collections. Today, more than 250 academic and research libraries worldwide have adopted the Summon™ service, which provides instant access to the breadth of authoritative content that is the hallmark of great libraries.
About Gemeinsamer Bibliotheksverbund (GBV)
The Gemeinsamer Bibliotheksverbund (GBV) is the cataloguing and service-oriented network for scientific, research and public libraries. The head office of the GBV (VZG) is responsible for library automation and the development of new innovative library specific services. Based upon the shared cataloguing service as the fundamental task of the VZG, the responsibilities quickly expanded to offering Online-Interlibrary Loan (ILL), and document delivery service like subito. Additionally, the GBV has established a virtual library in form of the GBV Union Catalogue (GVK) combining the holdings of all participating libraries and making them easily accessible to the public. The internet services are specifically designed for the needs of end-users by providing standardized layouts for all offered databases.
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®.