ProQuest

ProQuest Company is an Ann Arbor, Michigan based company specializing in microfilm and electronic publishing.

Eugene Power founded the company as University Microfilms in 1938, preserving works from the British Museum on microfilm. He also noticed a niche market in dissertations publishing. Students were often forced to publish their own works in order to finish their doctoral degree. Dissertations could be published more cheaply as microfilm than as books. As this market grew, the company expanded into filming newspapers and periodicals. ProQuest still publishes so many dissertations that its digital dissertations collection has been declared the official U.S. off-site repository of the Library of Congress. 

In his autobiography Edition of One, Power details the development of the company, including how University Microfilms assisted the OSS during World War II. This work mainly involved filming maps and European newspapers so they could be shipped back and forth overseas more cheaply and discreetly.

Xerox owned the company for a time in the 1970s and 1980s, and it was later bought by Bell & Howell. The name of the company changed several times in this period, from University Microfilms to Xerox University Microfilms, to University Microfilms International, then shortened to UMI (possibly meant to distance itself from the seemingly archaic medium of microfilm).

In the 1980s, UMI began producing CD-ROMs and databases of periodicals abstracts and indexes, eventually leading to online subscriptions to databases.

In the 1990s, with many new electronic media available, microform seemed to be on the decline. The company has tried to ride this wave out and catch the next wave by emphasizing its electronic business, including selling access to online versions of current periodicals, mainly sold to schools, universities or libraries. The proquest vision of its place in electronic content expanded further in acquiring Seattle start-up Serials Solutions a venture providing access management and search services for content hosted by other companies.

In 1999, the name changed to Bell & Howell Information and Learning, and finally in 2001 to ProQuest Information and Learning.

Besides offering current periodicals, ProQuest more recently began a project to digitize its entire archive of microfilm. This "Digital Vault Initiative" would include 5.5 billion images, including some of the best existing copies of major newspapers dating back 100 to 150 years, and Early English books dating back to the 1400s. The project is already well underway &mdash; through its ProQuest Historical Newspapers service, ProQuest is already providing full text searches of New York Times page images (scanned from microfilm) published between 1851 and 2001.