BELL & HOWELL BECOMES PROQUEST

By: Staff Reports Company To Expand Digital Archiving Effort


Bell & Howell Co., which has been digitizing archives of papers
such as The New York Times and The Wall Street
Journal, restructured last week and adopted its new name,
ProQuest Co., from its online division. The Ann Arbor, Mich.-
based company plans to continue expansion of its efforts to
digitize newspapers, periodicals, dissertations, and out-of-print
books.

The company claims to have the world's largest commercial archive
of content, including 7,000 newspapers and 20,000 periodicals,
and nearly 6 billion pages of information on microfilm. These
archives are made available via the Internet, CD, and microfilm -
- primarily to educational institutions.

Bell & Howell sold its imaging business to Kodak earlier this
year for $135 million. The company also sold its international
mail and messaging technologies business to Pitney Bowes for $51
million. The State-side mail and messaging business is still for
sale.

The sales were made to pay down the company's existing debt and
to restructure the company as it shifts strategy.

The company's Historical Newspapers project will continue to add
clients to a list that already includes the Times, the
Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, and The
Washington Post.

Joe Reynolds, president of ProQuest Information and Learning, has
a pitch for newspapers that he believes will be hard for them to
turn down. He said, "I'm going to foot the bill to digitize their
archives. I've offered to host it, and I'm going to distribute it
to the international education market."

Reynolds said that the resulting database contains full-page
images from newspapers, including advertisements. The text of
this database is searchable, using software developed in house.

ProQuest plans to launch derivative products by compiling content
in various packages. Genealogy products, particularly from
newspapers' obit and wedding pages, are highly marketable,
Reynolds said. The value is in how you package it, he added.

For now, ProQuest owns the digital resell rights for the
educational market only, but Reynolds said he could see selling
access to the data on a subscription basis if the companies
permit him to do so.

ProQuest will continue to store content on microfilm because,
Reynolds said, there continues to be a market for it. Last year
alone, 4,000 libraries acquired The New York Times on
microfilm, he said.



Related story:
BELL & HOWELL TO DIGITIZE OLD NEWSPAPER ARCHIVES (01/18/01)



Copyright 2001, Editor & Publisher.