Jyväskylä University Library acquires ProQuest resources for their multi-disciplinary needs
Jyväskylä University Library (JUL) was established in 1912 and serves over 600,000 customers each year. With seven faculties to serve, the library contains a vast array of resources to cover their multi-disciplinary group. Key for the university is the content they can provide for their students and researchers and so they turned to ProQuest to enhance their current standings.
ProQuest have built a strong relationship with the university library and so were a natural choice for the library to approach when looking to expand their library resources. The library was also keen to reflect on the new ProQuest platform, “this is a good native platform, and it’s easy to see why a researcher would want to go straight to search a database in his/her own subject field to perform searches.”
To meet the needs for digital primary resources the university library already had the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (HCPP) and a number of different Historical Newspaper Archives including The New York Times, Guardian and Observer and the Wall Street Journal. Feedback from researchers was essential in the decision to renew access to the HCPP database, according to Ulla Pesola, librarian at JUL, “the resource is extremely important“ and she states that one political science professor said, “This is the most important database the library has to offer." Pesola also stated that “primary digital sources are highly important for research and save both time and money by cutting travelling.”
In addition to these digital content databases, Jyväskylä University Library also acquired ProQuest Central, which was described as “a good, extensive database that met the needs of a multidisciplinary university well. It addressed many specific needs we had for journals, in addition to giving us an extensive addition to our collection.”
ProQuest Central is the ultimate cross-disciplinary research tool allowing users to search a huge collection of relevant, high quality information across 160 subject areas and in the formats most used by today’s researchers.
In addition, ProQuest Central also contains 30 of the most valued databases, including ABI/INFORM Complete, ProQuest Newsstand, Health & Medical Complete and ProQuest Research Library. Users can search individual databases for targeted research or search all at once to find relevant results from other disciplines.
The ebrary platform has been used by the university longer than any other and is very familiar to the users of the library. In part due to ebrary and also to having content available through this platform, the library’s e-journal and ebooks usage has grown.
In addition to those mentioned above, Jyväskylä University Library has a large collection of ProQuest databases and services including Refworks, Academic Complete, and ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global Full Text.