ANN ARBOR, Mich., November 13, 2006 - McMaster University has chosen ProQuest Information and Learning as its partner in two major electronic publishing initiatives designed to promote and offer access to the institution's scholarship around the world. McMaster launched DigitalCommons@McMaster, the first Canadian installation of the ProQuest Digital Commons institutional repository service. McMaster also selected ProQuest to digitize hundreds of its dissertations and theses, previously available only in paper or microfilm formats.

"This partnership combines the most-used hosted institutional repository service with a most distinguished research university," said David "Skip" Prichard, president of ProQuest Information and Learning, "We are glad to bring our established UMI Dissertations Publishing, our Digital Archiving and Access Program, and the new technology of Digital Commons together to provide McMaster with a single repository for the entire depth and breadth of their university's intellectual output."

DigitalCommons@McMaster will provide a publishing vehicle for McMaster's faculty and staff, as well as a permanent location for special digital collections.  Because Digital Commons is a turnkey system, it allowed McMaster to establish its repository quickly, yet with powerful capabilities.  McMaster selected ProQuest's Digital Archiving and Access Program to digitize 3,455 dissertations and theses.  Upon completion, the digital content will be available in ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, the database of record for graduate research.

Both projects will come together in DigitalCommons@McMaster, which will include among its collections the citations and abstracts of the digitized theses and dissertations.  McMaster students and faculty on campus will be able to link to the full text of the dissertations and theses free of charge, while DigitalCommons@McMaster visitors from around the world will have access through their own institution's full-text ProQuest Dissertations & Theses subscriptions.

"By selecting Digital Commons as our platform we're able to focus more on our users and their needs and less on the technology itself," said Jeff Trzeciak, university librarian at McMaster .    "We can use our limited human resources to focus on the promotion and use of our repository."

Institutional repositories are centralized digital collections of a university's intellectual heritage, making its scholarly works freely available on an open access basis to researchers via the internet. 
Digital Commons is a service offered by technology partners ProQuest and the Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress), which allows institutions to create peer-reviewed e-journals, provides user-friendly features, and includes OAI compliance, which makes it easy to locate the repository's content in a variety of ways, including from outside search engines, such as Google.

About McMaster 

McMaster University, a world-renowned, research-intensive university, fosters a culture of innovation, and a commitment to discovery and learning in teaching, research and scholarship. Based in Hamilton, the University is one of four Canadian universities listed on the Top 100 universities in the world. It has a student population of more than 23,000, and an alumni population of 120,000 in 128 countries.

 

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.