Cambridge, United Kingdom, February 24, 2004 - ProQuest Information and Learning, a unit of ProQuest Company, has acquired Copley Publishing Group, Inc. Copley publishes high-quality customized textbooks for academic use. The new product line will become part of ProQuest’s XanEdu^™ faculty and student resources for the higher education market.

Copley Publishing Group, based in Acton, Mass., was founded in 1984 to meet a growing need for customized texts. Custom textbooks contain copyright-cleared material selected by faculty, as well as faculty-written sections, for all disciplines. They are often used for interdisciplinary courses and humanities survey courses, such as Western civilization.

“With combined XanEdu and Copley resources, customers will gain enhanced access to pre-cleared resources, the ability to make smaller runs of custom editions, and expert editorial searching services to pinpoint essential articles, to create the high-quality Copley textbooks customers have come to expect,” said Frank Ellsworth, president of Copley Publishing Group.

XanEdu online and print course materials offer premium curriculum-based materials customized by college and university faculty members for their courses. These resources come from ProQuest’s extensive vault of scholarly journals, periodicals, newspapers, books, primary works of world literature, and academic collections. Additionally, XanEdu’s collections hold premium content, including the largest compilation of business cases. XanEdu products provide unparalleled copyright-clearance services for material outside these archives.

“We will be able to build on Copley’s great reputation in the market and excellent relationships with customers and publishers, backed by our own strong technology and delivery systems, to add custom text books to the XanEdu product line,” said Ron Klausner, president of ProQuest Information and Learning.

The merger will be seamless for Copley customers. Both companies provide a high standard of customer service that customers have come to expect: superior quality, attention to detail, working closely with professors on proofing, on-time delivery to bookstores, and books that look like traditional texts, not inexpensive “book club” editions.

For more about XanEdu offerings, please visit www.xanedu.com.

About ProQuest
ProQuest creates specialized information resources and technologies that propel successful research, discovery, and lifelong learning. A global leader in serving libraries of all types, ProQuest offers the expertise of such respected brands as Chadwyck-Healey™, UMI®, SIRS®, and eLibrary®. With Serials Solutions®, Ulrich's™, RefWorks®, COS™, Dialog® and now Bowker® part of the ProQuest brand family, the company supports the breadth of the information community with innovative discovery solutions that power the business of books and the best in research experience.

More than a content provider or aggregator, ProQuest is an information partner, creating indispensable research solutions that connect people and information. Through innovative, user-centered discovery technology, ProQuest offers billions of pages of global content that includes historical newspapers, dissertations, and uniquely relevant resources for researchers of any age and sophistication—including content not likely to be digitized by others. Inspired by its customers and their end users, ProQuest is working toward a future that blends information accessibility with community to further enhance learning and encourage lifelong enrichment.

For more information, visit www.proquest.com or the ProQuest parent company website, www.cig.com.