[Wactclc-primo] ProQuest search box on web

[Guidry, Wade]

This is great info, Laura. Thanks.

Nice that they responded so quickly to Renton's absence from the tool.
I'd recommend anyone else who finds their institution missing to let ProQuest know.

I believe one motivation ProQuest has behind search.proquest.com  is to bypass the pre-search authentication requirements of their more traditional search interfaces.

I'm sure they know as well as we do that having to authenticate creates friction, and that institutional and proxied authentication, unfortunately, doesn't always "just work". Getting users to search results faster helps them get to the customer more quickly, and make their products "stickier". And they probably figure that a user looking at actual search results will be more motivated to solve any authentication hurdles than users who haven't even searched yet. And the more users making use of your subscriptions, the more likely you'll continue subscribing.

(And there's a "pro" embedded in there for Primo. Primo also offers access to pre-authentication search results.)

Beyond that, I imagine they're thinking about what comes next in discovery as much as we, or their competitors. do. And as a vendor, they want to get there first.

For my own part, I'd love it if this new search.proquest.com platform relies on the same index as the new Central Discovery Index (CDI), that Primo and Summon also use. My thought is that, the more customers using a given index, the important fixing metadata issues becomes, because of how that kind of ubiquitous platform magnifies any single metadata issue.

There is certainly already a lot of crossover between Primo and ProQuest customers. But Primo represents only a subset of all ProQuest customers. Having a single index to rule them all would bring more weight to bear on identifying and fixing errors.


Wade Guidry
Library Consortium Services Manager, WACTCLC
wadeg at bigbend.edu<mailto:wadeg at bigbend.edu>
(509) 760-4474
http://www.wactclc.org


From: Wactclc-primo <wactclc-primo-bounces at lists.ctc.edu> On Behalf Of Staley, Laura
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Subject: [Wactclc-primo] ProQuest search box on web

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Hi, All -

Just FYI - this is about https://search.proquest.com.   It's a followup to a discussion we had about this in this morning's Alma/Primo meeting.

I wondered why Renton Tech didn't show up in the list of possible libraries.  So I called ProQuest Tech Support, they quickly did something (unspecified) at their end, and we now appear as an option.

When I selected Renton Tech as my library, I got the standard RTC authentication box. And after log-in, as of now, it just shows our usual subscription databases.  If there is more/other open material, it's not showing up currently. Of course, it doesn't officially roll out until next week, so that may be a factor.

As someone else noted this morning, I'm still not sure why it's here, unless it is to make sure that when our students Google ProQuest, they get to our databases.

(I should say also that I don't know that we're required to call them. It's possible that we will all be in there when it officially goes live next week.)

Thanks,

Laura Staley / RTC Library

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