When University Microfilms (later known as UMI) first opened its doors in 1938, founder Eugene Power was racing against time. War clouds threatened the treasures of scholarship in the British Museum, and Power was determined to preserve them on microfilm. The result was UMI's first (and only) product that year: Early English Books, the ongoing microfilm edition of the printed works listed in Short-Title Catalogue I (Pollard & Redgrave) and Short-Title Catalogue II (Wing).

Soon afterwards, Power began gathering, indexing, filming, and republishing doctoral dissertations in microform and print. Today, our Dissertation Abstracts database has archived over 2.3 million dissertations and master's theses. Some two million of them are available in full text in print, microform, and digital format.

The UMI microfilm vault—now one of ProQuest CSA's assets—constitutes the largest commercially available microform collection in the world. Its 5.5 billion page images deliver 500 years of information, drawn from thousands of literary, journalistic, and scholarly works. Every year we add another 37 million images of contemporary information.

Today we digitize both current and retrospective content for inclusion in the ProQuest Digital Vault. Still, we continue to produce many products in microform and print, such as research collections, directories, dissertations, newspapers, indexes, and out-of-print books.