THE PROQUEST AND EX LIBRIS PARTNERSHIP INCREASING CUSTOMER
THE PROQUEST AND EX LIBRIS PARTNERSHIP: INCREASING CUSTOMER ROI FOR SUBSCRIPTIONS AND DISCOVERY Cristina Blanca-Sancho, Senior Product Manager 3 September 2015 IGe. LU 2015 – Budapest
Why we are here…. Press Release ANN ARBOR, MI and JERUSALEM, ISRAEL—January 25, 2014 Pro. Quest and Ex. Libris Cooperate to Improve Research Workflows Content Indexing and interoperability improve service and choice for researchers, students, and librarians ANN ARBOR, MI and JERUSALEM, ISRAEL—January 25, 2014. Information industry leaders Pro. Quest and Ex Libris® Group understand that researchers and librarians search for and manage content using solutions from different providers. Today, the two companies announced a collaboration to make their key services work better together to improve user experience and support customer choice. The most immediate benefit for mutual customers will be the indexing of dozens of Pro. Quest’s most widely used content databases in the Ex Libris Primo® Central Index of scholarly electronic resources. When the first stage of work is completed, Pro. Quest’s ebrary® and EBL-Ebook Library® collections will become discoverable by all Primo Central users as well. While Pro. Quest's Summon® discovery solution includes this content already for its many customers, enabling its full indexing in Primo Central will further enhance its discoverability to users of the Ex Libris Primo® discovery and delivery solution. To expand choice even further, the companies will also work together to identify and investigate additional points of integration with their respective library management software solutions • Pro. Quest-Ex Libris partnership announced at ALA, Jan ‘ 14 • Partnership will result in Pro. Quest content indexed in Primo Central, followed by Pro. Quest hosted Ebooks • Potential greater interoperability between Summon and Alma, Aleph and Voyager 2
When we announced the partnership, the response was very positive 3
What I hope to share… 1. Why did Pro. Quest do this? 2. What exactly are we doing? 3. What have been the results so far? What have we learned? 4
To help orient you… Pro. Quest hosts an enormous amount of content A Bird’s eye view of Pro. Quest’s aggregation databases • 20, 000 journals • 3, 000 publishers • 1, 500 News sources 4 Billion documents • 4, 000 dissertations • 750, 000 books • Major historical programs 5
Aggregation and Historic content goes back in time And we offer a host of historic content 200 million pages of historic content 6
Aggregation and Historic content goes back in time Time + 7
Aggregation and Historic content goes back in time And what we have done is to put all of this into a very large box…. and shrink it Aggregation has a time dimension And we offer a host of historic content Time + ZZ Content 200 million pages of historic content 8
The partnership with Ex Libris is a cornerstone of ensuring our content is discoverable • Inclusion of Pro. Quest indexed databases in Primo Central Z Content 9
We want our content to be discovered the way our customers want… We don’t want this conversation… We want to have this very different conversation Of course if you want users to discover the content we sell you… you have to buy our other service. You want your content more discoverable? Do you have Primo Central? Wonderful! Z Content 10
Within Pro. Quest our partnership raised many questions – Customer centricity was the common answer to all Internal Question Internal Answer “Should we limit Pro. Quest hosted content to be findable only in Summon (Pro. Quest’s Discovery Service)? ” “No. Customers would recognize this, and ultimately would not trust us. ” “Why are we partnering with Ex Libris? Don’t they sell a competing product? ” “We compete against Ex Libris, but if a customer has chosen Primo and they subscribe to our content, we want it discoverable there too. ” “Can we say that we are “opening up our content” but be slow to work with partners? ” “No. Our partners and our customers would recognize this. And it is not how we do business. ” • Ultimately, our customers return to us because we deliver value, we don’t withhold it. • If we are customercentric this partnership is a ‘no -brainer’ – it helps users reach our content if that is what they seek 11
What is the status of the partnership? Ingested to date… • Over 300 databases • Major databases have been done, e. g. : • Pro. Quest Central • Pro. Quest Dissertations and Theses • Literature Online • ABI/INFORM suite of products • Periodicals Archive Online • EBL and ebrary ebooks • Chadwyck-Healey databases such as Early English Books Online To come next … • Additional government/historical products (e. g. History Vault) • Additional Chadwyck-Healey products Our intention is to load as much content as possible. Only in a few cases, related to 3 rd party license agreements, is content excluded. 12
A librarian view of switching on Pro. Quest databases in Primo Central
In one click an end user transitions from Ex. Libris to Pro. Quest Central Seamless one-click transition from Primo Central to Pro. Quest hosted content To Pro. Quest 14
What have the results been so far? A small sample suggests positive impact Sample 20 institutions with Primo and significant Pro. Quest subscriptions, otherwise randomly chosen. Diverse institution complexion: • 9 North America • 6 Europe • 5 APAC Increase in ’ 15 vs. ’ 14 YOY usage first 6 months Ave. Increase N= 20 institutions, usage= FT retrievals/downloads in sample All 6 months +123% 5 months +210% 4 months +56% 3 months -5% 2 months +17% 1 month -31% • 2 small schools • 3 technology focused +98% 15
What have the results been so far? Customer feedback has been positive… 1. Customers have been very positive “We are paying for the content… we want to display it any way we can. I give credit to Pro. Quest and Ex. Libris forging the partnership? - Amira Aaron, Associate Dean, Scholarly Resources, NEU “Before the partnership, I estimate 70% of subscribed products were in Primo Central, Pro. Quest was the missing piece. ” - David Wells, Manager, Collections, Curtin U. “Pro. Quest brings more metadata to Primo Central. We noticed more search results and have seen a jump in usage, especially for newspaper and A&I content” - Jennifer Quilliam, Manager, Information Resources, U of SA 2. Implementation has been easy, with only minor hiccups “We switched it on and records appeared” - David Wells, Manager, Collections, Curtin U. “It is working well. It does require login to benefit though, which can be a challenge” - Amira Aaron, Associate Dean, Scholarly Resources “It was easy to configure. Some identifiers are not passed through, but overall it has been a success. ” - Jennifer Quilliam, Manager, Information Resources, U of SA 16
What have our learnings been… 1. Partnerships require building trust Requires continued willingness to push through obstacles, which, in turn builds trust. • Must be embraced from the top of each organization • Appropriate professional conduct is essential 2. The devil is in the details A lot of precision effort is required to ensure a seamless user experience. This includes focus on: • Rights management with our publishing partners • Mapping naming conventions • Access and entitlement and customer matching • Hand-offs between first, second and third line support 3. For mutual customers, benefits may be significant We expect this collaboration will benefit users and libraries. • Preliminary results and customer responses are positive. 17
On behalf of Pro. Quest, thank you… To Ex Libris… To our customers… • For being a willing partner to support customer and user needs • For working through many issues in implementation • For providing constant feedback requesting this partnership • For your patience while we work through the process and add more and more products … I am happy to take any questions 18
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