Summon Discovery Service Expands Content with Multiple International Publishers

SEATTLE, Oct. 10, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Serials Solutions^®, a ProQuest^® business, announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair it has signed agreements with AskZad, ciando GmbH, the European Patent Office (EPO) and Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN SA. Researchers around the world searching for unique, authoritative academic content will be able to use the Summon discovery service to find a vast collection of international materials alongside their library's other resources.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120620/DE27948LOGO-c )

The agreements demonstrate a continued commitment by Serials Solutions toward building the most comprehensive collection of international research content discoverable in a single unified index. Content from all participating providers is normalized to a common search schema in the Summon index. This approach ensures unbiased relevancy, makes all content equally discoverable, and provides researchers easily navigable paths to the content they seek.

"This announcement amplifies our ongoing effort to work closely with publishers to build and maintain a single index that exposes this international content to more researchers," said John Law, vice president discovery services, Serials Solutions. "The integration of this diverse content, along with advanced native language searching capabilities for 17 languages, and an interface available in 32 languages and dialects, makes Summon even more relevant to researchers around the world."

AskZad, offers an extensive collection of Middle Eastern digital resources. Metadata and content will be indexed from the following collections:

• Pan-Arab E-Books (PAEB) contains a growing library of nearly 26,000 digitized books, covering a range of topics from religion, politics and economy, to literature, poetry and art. Authors are often highly respected professors from elite universities in the Middle East.
• Pan-Arab Academic Journal Index (PAJI) contains full Arabic language indices of more than 800 journals published in Egypt and the Arab world.
• Pan-Arab Dissertations (PAD) contains almost 8,000 dissertations published by graduate students in the Middle East in any language. The dissertations cover many disciplines in both applied and social sciences.

ciando GmbH is a leading provider of e-books, including fiction and non-fiction, as well as literature from all areas of science. Metadata for 155,000 e-books from 600 publishers will be added to the Summon unified index. Close to 90% of the e-books are in German and the company works with a number of major German universities and institutional libraries.

The European Patent Office (EPO) is a global player and one of Europe's largest international organisations. The EPO is the executive arm of the European Patent Organisation. Its publications include material about inventions and technical developments dating back to 1836. Approximately 70 million patent documents from Espacenet will be discoverable through Summon.

Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN SA is one of the largest scientific publishers in Poland and an owner of the digital platform IBUK which serves more than 90 academic universities and public libraries. The agreement includes metadata for more than 3,000 e-book titles in Polish.

The Summon Service
Used by more than 450 libraries in more than 40 countries, the Summon service is the first and only discovery service based on a unified index of content, leveraging its unique "match and merge" technology to combine rich metadata and full text from multiple sources to ultimately make items more discoverable. In just three years, the Summon unified index has grown from 200 million items to more than one billion items – with the vast majority of article and book content full-text searchable.

About AskZad / 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.

About ciando GmbH
The ciando GmbH, based in Munich is one of the leading e-book providers in Germany. The company has approximately 250,000 book titles in catalog and sells eBooks on more than 100 platforms and download stores from publishers, booksellers and libraries. The selection includes fiction, non-fiction books, as well as guide books and literature from all areas of science.

About European Patent Office (EPO)
The European Patent Office (EPO) provides a central one-stop service to both individual inventors and companies from around the world. It enables them to obtain patent protection in up to 40 European states through a uniform procedure requiring just one application. Today, the EPO is one of Europe's leading international organisations, with 7 000 staff from more than 30 nations working in Munich, The Hague, Berlin, Vienna and Brussels. It is the executive arm of the European Patent Organisation, and is entirely self-financed with an annual budget of EUR 1.8 billion.

About Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN SA
WN PWN is a major and the most renowned Central European publisher of scientific, educational and professional titles, such as dictionaries, encyclopaedias, textbooks and publications in science and the humanities. Based in Warsaw and founded in 1951, PWN has maintained its intense presence in the non-fiction market and for over half a century retained the status of a major scientific publishing house, comparable to Oxford, Cambridge or John Wiley & Sons, with whom PWN cooperates on a daily basis.

About Serials Solutions
Serials Solutions provides industry-leading technology solutions for libraries worldwide. The company helps libraries work better by providing innovative, practical Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions for discovery and management. Driven by a comprehensive knowledgebase and coupled with unparalleled client support services, these solutions uniquely merge unsurpassed understanding of libraries. Serials Solutions is a dedicated partner of libraries working to remain vital and relevant to their users and communities.

Serials Solutions, a ProQuest business, is headquartered in Seattle, Washington. 
www.serialssolutions.com

SOURCE Serials Solutions