Corner Office: ProQuest's Marty Kahn

In a scant three years at ProQuest, Marty Kahn, CEO, has moved a company coming out of a financial morass back onto solid ground. He came on board after the purchase of ProQuest Information and Learning by the (mostly) privately owned Cambridge Information Group in late 2006 and the merger of ProQuest and CSA to form ProQuest CSA. (It's now just ProQuest to capitalize on the brand recognition). In 2008, the company made three significant acquisitions, including federated search company WebFeat, which joined ProQuest's own Serials Solutions; RefWorks, of which it had been a part owner; and Dialog, by far the largest addition in terms of scale and revenue.

Under Kahn's leadership, the company has grown, especially in countries like China, India, Brazil, and in the former Eastern bloc. Its market remains strongly academic, though ProQuest has reintegrated and begun to invest in its schools division. It put significant money and research into the development of a one-stop search tool, Summon—a unified search and discovery service that will pre-index all the print and electronic materials a library owns. It formed a partnership with Google that will enable the company to digitize its considerable microfilm vault of hundreds of millions of pages of historical newspapers.

When LJ spoke to Kahn in early January, ProQuest was on the verge of announcing Summon. Since then, we've written extensively about the product (see LibraryJournal.com/Summon), but we got a first glimpse of the vision for it and ProQuest's other plans here.

LJ: ProQuest seems to have had a good 2008. Given the economic situation, what's your forecast for this year?

Kahn: We looked at the world and said we don't want to bring out more than the libraries can absorb. We should be doing investment in our platform so libraries can get more value from what they are already paying for. I hope we're not being too cautious...we're coming out with things we think are really great that people are going to want to have, but we don't want to push it on organizations that may feel financial pressure to cut back.

It's a balancing act. We've got some great new stuff coming. More historical newspapers, some other historical collections, some really terrific enhancements to dissertations collections, and we're going to expand [our] dissertations [collection] to all around the world.

Can you talk a little about the three- to five-year vision. How is ProQuest evolving?

First of all, we are total believers in the role that libraries and librarians are going to perform over a very long horizon. Their creative role in helping their communities find sources of information and of enlightenment is far from diminishing, and it will be increasing in a more and more informationally complex world. What keeps coming out is what deep and abiding community support libraries have in the broadest sense, in academic centers and with the public. We think ProQuest can play a role in helping librarians carry out that mission more and more effectively in terms of aggregating collections, which we've done well for a long time, and in providing tools to facilitate sifting through all sorts of things, which we've also been doing, say, through Serials Solutions, and which we're going to increase dramatically starting this year [with Summon].

How does the Google deal fit into your growth?

We're working with Google to get a whole bunch of historical newspapers digitized. It was too expensive to imagine ProQuest (originally University Microfilms) or the library community paying for it. We have microfilm in our vaults that even the Library of Congress doesn't have. We don't know everything that's back there because this is the history of many, many decades of microfilming and acquisitions of other microfilm companies.

The deal we struck with Google, unlike the Google book deal with publishers, is very much a partnership that both respects the rights holder, if there is a surviving rights holder for things in copyright, but also with ProQuest acting as a representative of the library community. We're going to digitize hundreds of millions of pages that will be available free for people who want to search on Google.

We also have full digital rights to this material. We will be able to organize it and package it and host it in a way that will serve the needs of more serious researchers, people who are doing genealogical research or community research, the student or the scholar. We will go through and provide historical indexing. At the simplest level, for example, the Civil War was not called “civil war” during the war.

For genealogical research, we will layer on current maps so you can begin to find what was [happening] on a street moving forward and backward in time. We're beginning to put historical newspapers together, as we've done with our black historical newspapers, so a researcher or student can thoughtfully look at how news events were reported in different types of newspapers.

We've heard a lot of criticism of Google scans. How satisfied are you with Google quality control?

It's our microfilm. We're starting with high quality. If you look at our historical newspapers, our very best collections were done to an extraordinarily high level of quality. This won't be to that level. It's insanely expensive. We're very involved with specs and quality control. When Google sets their mind to something, they're very good. It's very effective and cost efficient. It's not cheap, but at least it will be at a price that will be affordable. Information that was locked away in microfilm in a handful of libraries will now be available to the world at large.

The most useful application for this information will come from the presentation of it in libraries. The library version will be superior, which we hope they will get from ProQuest.

Where does a company like ProQuest fit in as magazines and newspapers go online only?

Our job is to figure out a way to capture what is passing quickly in a historic context. Capturing enough of it puts enormous potential storage requirements on us. We can certainly handle that, so people in the future can go back and look at what was being reported.

We need to index [this born-digital content] in a useful way so people in the future can make some sense of it. That's what we are investing in this year, indexing approaches and methodologies that can begin to capture that really rich combination of print and online editions and all the associated screens going out. We license, distribute Critical Mention (CM), which is a service that captures television news, not just national but local news, so you can literally search on what was the first mention of any topic you want—Bernie Madoff, tasers. It gives the ability to get perspective on what is important but is fleeting. CM has only been around a few years, so there's no deep historical archive, but we will continue to build over time. We're selling CM to libraries, too.

You're working with Google; the public is being habituated to Google. How do you see that shaping your products going forward?

The answer to that is our new product, Summon. It's a unified discovery service at the simplest level, though it will be much richer than that. It will be sold to libraries, but it will be branded as the library, not ProQuest. It will sit on top of whatever OPAC the library has. It will essentially be a starting point with a Google-like one-search box. It will provide deep searching of all the library holdings...including electronic. It will be sophisticated, so it will work for the casual searcher or serious student or scholar. It will pull information sitting in a book, or a journal, or a magazine, or any other type of publication or blog and pull it forward and allow the information seeker to drill down and do all sorts of refinements. It will be available for patrons to use wherever they are. We're actually indexing all of the underlying literature that the library has purchased.

We think it will make a dramatic difference. There will be no weighting in favor of ProQuest materials. That would destroy the whole purpose of this. Information will be treated neutrally; it will bring up the best results irrespective of content type. It can help libraries brand themselves as entry to all kinds of serious search activities—and to the kinds of materials libraries are paying for that you can't get from Google.

This was a big project; we spent a lot of money on it. We'll be indexing hundreds of millions of records. We're working with publishers, and, from their point of view, they hope that it will help their materials be readily discovered. Eventually it will be a portal to the open web. That's very much part of the specs.

A lot of research shows that people are satisfied with what they find on Google....

Our data, particularly for undergraduate students, says that's really not the case. An awful lot of people, even undergrads, are very mindful of the limitations of Google results. It's a little bit of a myth that students do their research on Google. They may start with Google, but often they get direction on where to go from their teachers.

I think Google Scholar is [Google's] effort to solve that. Part of the problem with Google Scholar still goes back to what you wind up getting access to. We want people to start by looking at everything their public library or their college library has; it's all going to be there.

How does all this fit in with the original ProQuest?

I read the biography of the founder of ProQuest, Eugene Power. In a weird way, the founders had a vision of what was coming. They were madly microfilming stuff though they had no view of how they were going to sell it. They saw microfilm as a mass distribution medium. And here we are fortunate to be able to follow on what they were doing for decades. If Power were alive today, there's no question he would be out there on the forefront of getting information out there on the open web.