ProQuest is best known in the genealogy world as the company that provides HeritageQuest Online. Their online offerings include U.S. census records, more than 20,000 digitized family history and local history books, PERSI, and other major databases of interest to genealogists. I believe that all their genealogy offerings to date have been U.S. sources. However, the genealogy business is just one part of ProQuest's many services.
Today ProQuest announced still more services that will be available soon. Even more interesting, the newly announced offering is for British documents.
The following is the announcement from ProQuest:
ProQuest Information and Learning, a provider of digital content from the 19th century, will digitize the full run of the British House of Commons Parliamentary Papers from 1801 to 1900 for release later this year. It will become part of ProQuest's continuing program to support 19th-century scholarship, joining the Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue (NSTC), the bibliographic spine of the program, and other new resources.
The digital collection of the British Parliamentary Papers 1801-1900 will include the detailed Chadwyck-Healey subject index and searchable ASCII text and images. NSTC already holds more than 1.2 million records from eight contributing libraries for titles published in the United Kingdom and the United States between 1801 and 1919. Additional components will be added to further define the new program, including: The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, from Taylor & Francis, an index to periodicals available for the period 1824-1900; Index to the Nineteenth Century House of Commons Parliamentary Papers 1801-1900, Palmer's Index to The Times, 1790-1905; Citation records for selected ProQuest 19th-century periodical and newspaper holdings, including the American Periodical Series Online.
Through NSTC, users will be able to access full text or images from a wide variety of research collections via direct links or OpenURL. ProQuest plans to work with the academic community to create direct links to existing digital collections currently loaded and hosted locally, driving traffic to other important resources. The company will also continue to cooperate with other commercial publishers to make the database an even stronger tool for organizing 19th-century digital content.
More information may be found in future weeks at http://www.il.proquest.com and at http://www.proquestcompany.com.
