American Antiquarian Society Collections to be Available Online

I am spending the day today at the American Library Association (ALA) annual conference in Washington, D.C. This is a huge, six-day show with many vendors that are well-known in genealogy circles. ProQuest is one of those vendors, known for its HeritageQuest Online product and several other huge databases of historical interest.

Today, ProQuest is announcing a major partnership with the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) to place a large collection of the Society's materials online.  Here is today's announcement. Please note that the method of accessing the information will be through your local library:

ProQuest and American Antiquarian Society Announce Partnership to Make Society's Collections Accessible to Libraries Everywhere

Initial Phase of Partnership Provides First-Ever Online and Microfilm Access to Society's Family History Book Collection

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - June 23, 2007 - At the American Library Association annual conference, ProQuest and the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) announced a multi-year agreement that will make key AAS collections available to libraries everywhere.  The first phase of the partnership will put family history books from the Society's renowned collections online and on microfilm for the first time.  America's ever-growing number of genealogists will access the resources through a variety of ProQuest's popular genealogy collections, including HeritageQuest® Online 

"ProQuest and the American Antiquarian Society have a shared goal of unlocking this vast resource and making it more accessible," said Rod Gauvin, senior vice president of ProQuest. "This initiative will preserve and protect a vital source of content, and make it more readily available to patrons, historians, and genealogists at libraries everywhere. We are honored to partner with one of the world's premier research institutions, and look forward to growing this relationship for years to come."   

Available exclusively from ProQuest, the first series of content from the American Antiquarian Society will help researchers uncover new and additional information about their families.  Located in Worcester, Massachusetts, the American Antiquarian Society's mission is to collect, preserve, and make available the printed record of what is now the United States from 1640 through 1876.  Their exceptional collection of genealogical material focusing on early North American lines of descent, including French-Canadian genealogies, has long been highly regarded not only by genealogists, but also by scholars working on biographical, historical, and literary topics.

"For nearly 200 years, the American Antiquarian Society has been committed to advancing the study of U.S. history at every level," said AAS president Ellen S. Dunlap.  "We're very excited to partner with ProQuest in bringing these valuable resources online and further preserving the historic record of America before the twentieth century."   

ProQuest will provide access to the material through HeritageQuest Online, a unique and continuously expanding collection of genealogical materials that trace family lineage and local American history since the late 1700s.  It combines digital, searchable images of U.S. Federal Census records with the UMI® Genealogy & Local History books collection, the Periodicals Source Index, and other valuable content. 

Microfilm will be available in ProQuest's UMI® Genealogy and Local History collection.  This collection assembles and preserves genealogies, local histories, primary source materials, and genealogical and local history serials. When complete, Genealogy and Local History will encompass materials related to all 50 states and Canada as well as Great Britain, Ireland and many other countries of immigration to North America, making it an unprecedented resource and a major preservation project.

The American Antiquarian Society titles are one of the most recent additions to ProQuest's growing family of genealogy resources. ProQuest's products provide the information researchers need to track their personal history - from vital records and primary sources to directories and finding aids such as dictionaries, bibliographies and gazetteers.  In addition to HeritageQuest Online and Genealogy and Local History in microform, other ProQuest genealogy resources include:  ProQuest® Obituaries, Ancestry® Library Edition, ProQuest Historical Newspapers™, Digital Sanborn® Maps, Canada's Heritage from 1844™, and UMI® HeritageQuest™ in microform.

Comments

[Kelly]

The American Antiquarian Society is one of the best places I have found for New England research. They have a large collection of unique source documents. I am glad to hear their offerings will be available to the public. Every time I have gone there, it is just not possible to stay long enough to get through all the resources they have.

[Dennis]

I urged my local library to get the home subscription service for Heritage Quest. They responded:

We trialed Heritage Quest a few months ago. We have an Electronic Databases Committee which meets to discuss where to spend the electronic resources portion of the budget. The Committee decided that there were problems with Heritage Quest that did not warrant diverting additional funds to purchase the extra genealogy database. The main problem with Heritage Quest is that the search parameters are so unreliable. A search in Ancestry Library will generally give you much more information than the same search in Heritage Quest. ProQuest admits that this is a problem. If and when Heritage Quest becomes as comprehensive as Ancestry Library, we will reconsider.

[Marie]

This is another great advancement in availability of information. Thank you for telling us.
Was any indication given of the time frame for starting this project and expected progress?

[Dick Eastman]

This project was ANNOUNCED this week but has been underway for some time. Scanners have been in operation at the American Antiquarian Society for months and many thousands of documents have already been scanned.

- Dick Eastman

[Pat]

I have found differences in search engines and original data between Ancestry.com, Heritage Quest and Genealogy.com. Here's what I have observed:

1. The version of PERSI on Ancestry.com is copyrighted 2006 and that on Heritage Quest is dated 2007 so is more up-to-date than the Ancestry version. Example: Surname Lampson search on the HeritageQuest site gives me 16 results. Surname Lampson search on Ancestry PERSI gives me 12 results.

2. The search engine for Ancestry.com and HeritageQuest for Book Searches yields different results than using Genealogy.com search engine (I don't currently subscribe but the last time I used it, I noticed that the search was utilizing a different url for HeritageQuest data than that used by Ancestry.com and HeritageQuest itself.) which gives more results for a given surname (in my case, Lampson).

If I could afford to subscribe to both Ancestry and Genealogy.com, I would probably do searches of PERSI and BOOKS on all of the websites to catch those that are left out on others. Shouldn't have to do this, but I don't know if the person who was suggesting ANcestry.Library meant that they did a similar search of ALL of AncestryLibrary or just the BOOKS under HeritageQuest. Again, I don't know if AncestryLibrary gives you different search results vs Home subscription to ANcestry World Deluxe? Maybe someone can answer that.

FINAL WORD: All search engines of the same database are not the same!