Free two-week access to 120 years of fashion and culture is available at portals across the Web

February 2, 2011 (ANN ARBOR, MI) – The award-winning Vogue Archive—every page from every issue of American Vogue from 1892 to today—will be available for free trial on ProQuest’s websites and online industry news sources around the world from February 2 through February 16. The new and unprecedented product, which puts 120 years of fashion and culture online within fingertip reach, has been named Best New Database of 2011 by Library Journal and Best Content Aggregation Service in the Software Information Industry Association’s CODiE Awards. The Vogue Archive is available to libraries worldwide through ProQuest® services.
“With so many so eager to see the Vogue Archive, we’re opening it for a few weeks. Librarians can now experience this incredible trove for themselves and explore history through the lens of one of culture’s greatest influencers,” said Mary Sauer-Games, ProQuest’s Senior Vice President of Publishing.
Librarians can access the Vogue Archive’s half million image-rich pages, examining the work of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ greatest designers, photographers, stylists, illustrators, and more. ProQuest’s signature crisp, clean digital images vividly reproduce Twiggy’s swing dress, Salvador Dali’s surrealist cover for beachwear, Grace Coddington’s elegant, intriguing fashion spreads, and more.
While it is a visual phenomenon, the Vogue Archive is also designed for serious research. It’s supported by precision data, making the smallest details on every page, including ads and covers, fully searchable. Individual images within the pages have been indexed, allowing users to find articles containing a certain garment type, designer, fabric and countless other search fields instantly, with expert results. For example, a search of “Dior” in the Vogue Archive will return in seconds a complete retrospective on the design house including appearances in features, photo shoots, illustrations, and ads, all through the most current issue. Until now, fashion historians conducted these searches manually through rare, fragile archival copies of the magazine.
The Vogue Archive can be experienced by visiting any ProQuest website, including www.proquest.com, Library Journal’s eViews (reviews.libraryjournal.com/category/blogs/eviews/?ref=menu), American Libraries (www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org ), or Against the Grain’s News Channel (www.against-the-grain.com).
“We think this free access is going to make a lot of people happy,” said Ms. Sauer-Games. “When the tweets from librarians say they’re crying with excitement, you know the product is right on target.”

About Vogue
The foundation of Vogue’s leadership and authority is the brand¹s unique role as a cultural barometer for a global audience. Vogue places fashion in the context of culture and the world we live in — how we dress, live, and socialize; what we eat, listen to, and watch; who leads and inspires us. Vogue invests in the industry at large, and continues to lead readers to what will happen next. Thought-provoking, relevant, and always influential, the power of Vogue continues to define the culture of fashion.
Follow us on Twitter @voguemagazine.

About Condé Nast
Condé Nast is home to some of the world¹s most celebrated media brands. In the United States, Condé Nast publishes 18 consumer magazines, four business-to-business publications, 27 websites, and more than 40 apps for mobile and tablet devices, all of which define excellence in their categories. The company also owns Fairchild Fashion Media (FFM), whose portfolio of brands serves as the leading source of news and analysis for the global fashion community. Condé Nast has won more National Magazine Awards over the past ten years than all of its competitors combined.

Follow us on Twitter @CondeNastCorp.

About ProQuest (www.proquest.com)
ProQuest connects people with vetted, reliable information. Key to serious research, the company has forged a 70-year reputation as a gateway to the world’s knowledge – from dissertations to governmental and cultural archives to news, in all its forms. Its role is essential to libraries and other organizations whose missions depend on the management and delivery of complete, trustworthy information.
ProQuest’s massive information pool is made accessible in research environments that accelerate productivity, empowering users to discover, create, and share knowledge.
An energetic, fast-growing organization, ProQuest includes the ProQuest®, Bowker®, Dialog®, ebrary®, and Serials Solutions® businesses and notable research tools such as the RefWorks®,and Pivot™ services, as well as its’ Summon® web-scale discovery service. The company is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with offices around the world.

Full support of Mac environment among enhancements made to the citation tool so popular with student and professional researchers

January 20, 2012 (ANN ARBOR, Mich.) – What group could be more vocal than researchers searching for critical content on deadline? Those who still need to finish a classroom assignment or professional project with proper formatting. Many of those researchers are loyal users of Write-N-Cite, the popular citation tool that is part of the RefWorks® line of online research organization tools. They are returning to their campuses and offices after holiday break, just in time for a major enhancement.
At the top of the enhancement “wish list” was the ability to use Write-N-Cite in both Window and Mac environments. As a result, it can run on Word for Windows 2007 and 2010 as well as Word for Mac 2008 and 2011. Both platforms provide the same features and sharing documents between computers is as easy as opening a file, leveraging the strengths of a Cloud-based service for all users.
“RefWorks users have been increasingly vocal about the need for better citation authoring capabilities for the Mac. I am delighted the new Write-N-Cite does more than that by providing unprecedented reference integration, ease-of-use and interoperability across Windows and Mac platforms.” said Rich LaFauci, senior vice president and general manager of ProQuest Research Solutions.
The new release improves everything from formatting enhancements to brand new features. Citations now format automatically while a user works, and styles are updated on demand without any manual formatting; no need to wait until a paper is finished to see the citations. Plus, easy footnote management means not worrying about the details of styles like MLA, Chicago or more than 1,600 other output styles.
Users can work wherever they want – at home, in a dorm room, the library, an office, on a plane or subway car. The new version of Write-N-Cite supports seamless online/offline work and easy access to documents across Mac and Windows. Auto Sync folders allow users to see what they’ve cited when they aren’t in their document. Finally, improved customization options and context-sensitive feedback ensure they can take full control of citations or leave it to the experts.
“We’ve long said that ProQuest is more than a content provider; just as important, we’re a partner in the research process,” said LaFauci. “ We see the new Write-N-Cite as a major enhancement, and are looking forward to showing our users additional key innovations”.

January 20, 2012 (ANN ARBOR, Mich.) — From its inception in 1908, The Christian Science Monitor has delivered comprehensive and meaningful coverage of global issues in a uniquely independent voice. With the long-standing agreement between the venerable news organization and ProQuest just extended through 2013, researchers of all types can continue to confidently support their work with access to coverage that isn’t influenced by corporate allegiances and pressures. The agreement extends across all types of media, enabling researchers to access it digitally — in products such as ProQuest Historical Newspapers and Newsstand — and in microfilm.

“The Christian Science Monitor is pleased to make available its rich content to libraries and researchers world-wide through ProQuest,” said Norm Williams, General Manager, Content Sales, Global Markets. “We believe the Monitor’s content — which is known for being substantive, anchored in fact, balanced in viewpoint, consciousness-raising, and award-winning – is uniquely valuable to the library and research communities which appreciate high-quality, fair-minded, deep, contextual, and explanatory journalism.”

“The Christian Science Monitor and ProQuest were both founded on the premise of providing authoritative content to a global audience,” said Rod Gauvin, senior vice president and general manager for ProQuest Information Solutions. “We have a great deal of respect for original thinkers and innovators, especially those with a penchant for providing forums for independent and alternative voices.” The Monitor’s founder, Mary Baker Eddy certainly qualifies. She launched her publication at the age of 87 after being provoked by Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World newspaper for her unconventional religious ideas. To this day, her mission “To injure no man, but to bless all mankind” continues to help shape the Monitor’s journalistic ideals and news coverage.

The Christian Science Monitor doesn’t cover the latest antics of Hollywood starlets or the meltdowns of heralded sports heroes. Rather, it intentionally avoids sensational stories in favor of more meaningful content as evidenced with their seven Pulitzer Prizes and 14 Overseas Press Awards. With embedded journalists in 11 countries, including Russia, China, France, the U.K., South Africa, Mexico, and India, as well as throughout the U.S., the Monitor is a renowned news organization that views itself as a public service rather than as an extension of its ownership – that of The First Church of Christ, Scientist.

To learn more, visit www.proquest.com

Information firm and civil rights organization work together to preserve archives and improve access

January 20, 2012 (ANN ARBOR, Mich.) – The first step in broad, digital access to the archives of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) commences in April when ProQuest and the venerable civil rights organization release the first in a series of modules for libraries and researchers. ProQuest® History Vault’s NAACP Papers 1 will provide the first electronic access to files from the group’s Board of Directors and Annual Conferences, as well as text of major speeches and national staff records.
Digital access is just one piece of a larger project to preserve the NAACP’s valuable records. ProQuest is working with NAACP offices throughout America to implement best practices for selecting, cataloging, storing and handling of original documents.
“Preservation and access to important, unique and historic content are the very foundation of ProQuest’s mission to support serious research,” said Rod Gauvin, senior vice president and general manager of ProQuest Information Solutions, a business unit serving the library market. “When we combine this rich, foundational content with our powerful research tools that allow researchers to find, compare and share, we accelerate the ability to discover, synthesize and understand.”
The NAACP archives are part of the rapidly expanding ProQuest® History Vault, which chronicles the American experience. For example, The Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century contains digitized documents from the founding of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs at the close of the 19th century to the riots that followed the verdict in the Rodney King police brutality case in the 1990s. Upcoming modules provide access to primary sources that document other facets of African American life: Slavery and the Law (due in March); Southern Life and African American History, 1775-1915, Plantations Records, Part 1 (due in June). Other collections of primary sources scheduled to release in 2012 include American Politics and Society from JFK to Watergate, 1960-1975 (due in September), and Struggle for Women’s Rights, 1880-1990: Organizational Records (due in December). Documents in History Vault are available for remote study and are supported by rich, intuitive search technology. Original archival arrangement schemes are preserved and PDFs of the original sources replicate the user experience of browsing through archive boxes, providing an unparalleled research experience for their students and faculty who would otherwise be unable to access materials held at geographically-dispersed archives.
History Vault’s NAACP archives are part of ProQuest’s vast portfolio of products that provide diverse viewpoints and lenses on news. The company’s rich research resources also include Historical Black Newspapers, an archive of digitized African-American newspapers, Jewish Newspapers, a developing archive of historical Jewish American papers, and Black Studies Center, a digital core collection of primary and secondary sources that record and illuminate the Black experience, from ancient Africa through modern times.

To learn about ProQuest’s mission to support serious research with important, unique content, visit www.proquest.com.

As first phase of overall platform rollout completes, ProQuest reveals rich enhancements

January 20, 2012 (ANN ARBOR, Mich.) — Libraries can offer their users a powerful research environment that goes where they are when ProQuest introduces a mobile interface for its new platform in the first half of 2012. The ability to discover, manage and share ProQuest’s unique content via smart phones and tablets is part of a series of enhancements launching as the company completes the first phase of its platform roll-out. It’s also one of a variety of mobile initiatives underway across the ProQuest enterprise, including a new dedicated mobile app from ebrary for the iPad®, iPhone® and iPod touch®.
“From the beginning we’ve set out to create an experience for the end-user that makes the library the best, most satisfying source for research,” said Tim Babbitt, Senior Vice-President, ProQuest® Platforms. “Researchers, especially students, tell us mobile is an essential element of the flexibility they expect from the library. It brings the library to where they are working.”
The ProQuest® interface will automatically optimize for any user tapping in from a phone or tablet. The ebrary® app provides optimized on- and off-line access to e-books, content uploaded to ebrary’s platform by librarians with DASH! ™ (Data Sharing, Fast), and an end-user’s own personal research from other sources. Future plans are to integrate the ProQuest® and ebrary® tools.
“The ebrary® app is focused on providing the best mobile experience to use ebooks and content uploaded by the library to the ebrary platform,” explained Mr. Babbitt. “Whereas, the ProQuest® mobile initiative optimizes the broad discovery and use of content. Working with users, we’ll continue to iterate to the best of overall experience, with innovative functionality around specific content, like ebooks.”

ProQuest introduced its groundbreaking, unified platform in 2010, enabling libraries to explore it and plan for the change at their own pace. Built from the ground-up, the platform creates a research experience that supports the user at every stage of the research process, from discovery to collaboration to output. About 90% of ProQuest’s customers around the world have now adopted it, with the balance migrating in 2012. With a critical mass of users now accessing the environment, ProQuest launched an intensive “voice of the user” feedback system. The company is using the feedback to identify areas for improvement to the research experience, analyze the unique habits of different segments of users and tap a continuous stream of direct comments and ratings. Consistently, users connect their satisfaction to the breadth of content available and the ability to navigate it easily.
“In a competitive information environment, users are in the driver’s seat,” said Mr. Babbitt. “We’re keenly aware of that at ProQuest and are committed to supporting the library by ensuring their users are genuinely satisfied.”
To learn more, visit www.proquest.com.

College, public and school libraries can now more easily purchase e-books from ebrary within their existing print acquisition workflow

January 20, 2012 – Palo Alto, CA, USA – To make it easier and more efficient for libraries to acquire e-books from trusted publishers, ebrary®, a ProQuest business and leading provider of e-books and research technology, today announced that a selection of more than 268,000 e-books is now integrated with Title Source™ 3, Baker & Taylor’s ordering platform used by academic, school and public libraries worldwide.

Tens of thousands of librarians who order books through Title Source 3 now have the option of choosing digital versions on the ebrary platform, which provides both online and offline access, with or without a new dedicated mobile app for the iPad®, iPhone® and iPad touch®. For details about ebrary’s free new app, which is now available on the App StoreSM, read today’s announcement at www.ebrary.com.

“We are excited to offer ebrary’s wide selection of titles to the variety of markets that we serve,” said George Coe, Baker & Taylor’s President of Library & Education division. “In addition to ebrary’s authoritative content from respected publishers, our community and career college, school, and public library customers will also benefit from ebrary’s technology, which makes it easy to do research, both on-and off-line.”

“Serving the needs of our library customers is our top priority, and Baker & Taylor has helped us do this through our integration with YBP and now Title Source 3,” said Kevin Sayar, ebrary’s President and General Manager. “We look forward to building on our relationship with Baker & Taylor, and further integrating our e-books and research technology with its industry-renowned services to bring value to all library markets.”

Additional ebrary News

In separate press releases issued today, ebrary announced a new dedicated mobile app, Facebook sign-in and the results of its 2011 Global Student E-book Survey. For more information, please visit www.ebrary.com.

About Baker & Taylor
Baker & Taylor, Inc. (www.baker-taylor.com) is the world’s largest distributor of books, digital content and entertainment products. The company leverages its unsurpassed worldwide distribution network to deliver rich content in multiple formats, anytime and anywhere. Baker & Taylor offers cutting-edge digital media services and innovative technology platforms to thousands of publishers, libraries and retailers worldwide. Baker & Taylor also offers industry-leading customized library services and retail merchandising solutions. Charlotte, N.C.-based Baker & Taylor is majority owned by Castle Harlan Partners IV, L.P., an institutional private equity fund managed by Castle Harlan, Inc., a leading private equity investment firm.

About ebrary (www.ebrary.com)

ebrary is a leading provider of e-books and research technology to libraries worldwide. Founded in 1999, the company offers more than 273,000 e-books from over 500 trusted publishers under flexible models including subscription, perpetual archive (purchase), patron driven acquisition, and short-term loans. As YBP Library Service’s preferred e-book partner, ebrary’s titles are available in GOBI™, as well as YBP’s Approval and Demand Driven Acquisition (DDA) service. ebrary is the only e-book provider that enables customers to upload and integrate their own digital materials right from their computers with DASH!™ (Data Sharing, Fast) technology as well as apply cross-referencing with multiple online resources with InfoTools™ technology. The company also offers a dedicated mobile app for the iPad®, iPhone® and iPod touch®. A ProQuest® business, ebrary is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, USA.

Apple, iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc.

Dr. Allen McKiel of Western Oregon University compares the findings with a similar survey conducted in 2008

January 20, 2012 – Palo Alto, CA, USA – ebrary®, a ProQuest business and leading provider of e-books and research technology, today announced that the results of its 2011 Global Student E-book Survey, which was created and distributed by librarians, is now publicly available along with a paper by Dr. Allen McKiel, Dean of Library Services at Western Oregon University. Anyone may access the new report online or offline on the ebrary platform along with previous e-book surveys sponsored by ebrary at http://site.ebrary.com/lib/surveys.

McKiel’s paper compares the results of the 2011 survey, which garnered over 6,300 student participants worldwide, with a similar survey that ebrary sponsored in 2008.

In the 2011 paper, McKiel writes: “Books, whether electronic or print, again provide assurance of validity to the highest percentage of students in this survey as in the 2008 survey. Five of the six top slots were given to books in both surveys. Print was also viewed as trustworthy by higher percentages of students than electronic resources with four of the top six resources in both years. The perceived viability of print is not surprising given the constant refrains of caution about, and personal experience with, the reliability of information on the Internet versus print. Students know that electronic information is transient and easy to produce compared to the product and processes of print publication. The barriers to print publication afford an intuitive impression of higher integrity.”

ebrary’s 2011 Global Student E-book Survey also included a separate social media section that was not available in the 2008 survey, which will be analyzed and freely available shortly. Librarians are encouraged to explore the data from ebrary surveys and share their thoughts and opinions with others. For additional information, please email feedback@ebrary.com.

Additional ebrary News

In separate press releases issued today, ebrary announced a new dedicated mobile app, Facebook sign-in and integration with Baker & Taylor’s Title Source™ 3. For more information, please visit www.ebrary.com.

About ebrary (www.ebrary.com)

ebrary is a leading provider of e-books and research technology to libraries worldwide. Founded in 1999, the company offers more than 273,000 e-books from over 500 trusted publishers under flexible models including subscription, perpetual archive (purchase), patron driven acquisition, and short-term loans. As YBP Library Service’s preferred e-book partner, ebrary’s titles are available in GOBI™, as well as YBP’s Approval and Demand Driven Acquisition (DDA) service. ebrary is the only e-book provider that enables customers to upload and integrate their own digital materials right from their computers with DASH!™ (Data Sharing, Fast) technology as well as apply cross-referencing with multiple online resources with InfoTools™ technology. The company also offers a dedicated mobile app for the iPad®, iPhone® and iPod touch®. A ProQuest® business, ebrary is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, USA.

Apple, iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc.

Researchers now have optimized access to e-books, content uploaded by their library with DASH!, and their own personal documents on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch
January 20, 2012 – Palo Alto, CA, USA – The demand for e-book accessibility, especially on mobile devices, is growing significantly. In ebrary’s 2011 Global Student E-book Survey, announced today and available at http://site.ebrary.com/lib/surveys, 60 percent of respondents indicated that downloading e-books onto mobile devices is “very important” – a 16 percent increase over results from a similar survey that ebrary sponsored in 2008. In ebrary’s recent Download Survey, librarians marked the iPad® as more important to providing offline access than desktops and laptops.

To meet researchers’ evolving needs, ebrary®, a ProQuest business and leading provider of e-books and research technology, today announced it has launched a new app for the iPad®, iPhone®, and iPod touch®. Available on the App Store SM, the free new app gives researchers an optimized way to experience authoritative content – both online and offline – from multiple sources. With ebrary’s new app, researchers can access content on the ebrary platform, including e-books that their librarians acquire from leading publishers and documents uploaded and integrated by librarians with DASH!™(Data Sharing, Fast). Additionally, researchers can import their own personal research – outside of the ebrary platform – through the app itself.

To make it easier to use ebrary – with or without the app – ebrary also announced the ability for researchers to sign-in with their Facebook usernames and passwords.

“We believe it is our responsibility to keep pace with the progressive ways in which students, professors and other researchers expect to find and use information,” said Kevin Sayar, President and General Manager of ebrary. “Technology will continue to evolve, and information will continue to surge. By shipping this new app and extending it to other sources beyond our e-book aggregation, we hope to help researchers more easily access and use the authoritative information they need to be more knowledgeable and productive.”

Key features and benefits of ebrary’s new mobile app include:
• Freely available with any ebrary product for libraries including Academic Complete™, which offers a growing selection of more than 70,000 e-books and enables libraries to upload their own content with DASH!
• Online and offline reading
• Seamless downloading of full titles
• Simple and advanced search
• Multiple navigation controls
• Table of contents with relevancy rankings
• Early check-in of ebrary’s e-books
• Copy and paste with automatic citation for offline documents
• User configurable download size warnings
• Import and use documents from other sources
• Available in English and Spanish
• Sign-in with Facebook user name and password
Demonstrations at ALA

ebrary will demonstrate its new mobile app at ALA Midwinter, January 20-23 in Dallas, Texas, in the ProQuest booth (#2007).

Additional Mobile News from ProQuest

In a separate press release issued today and available at www.proquest.com, ebrary’s parent company ProQuest announced the upcoming launch of a mobile interface for its powerful new research environment. Mobile initiatives are also in place or in development at Bowker, RefWorks and Serials Solutions, all part of the ProQuest enterprise.

Additional ebrary News

In separate press releases issued today, ebrary announced the availability of its 2011 Global Student E-book Survey and integration with Baker & Taylor’s Title Source™ 3. For more information, please visit www.ebrary.com.

About ebrary (www.ebrary.com)

ebrary is a leading provider of e-books and research technology to libraries worldwide. Founded in 1999, the company offers more than 273,000 e-books from over 500 trusted publishers under flexible models including subscription, perpetual archive (purchase), patron driven acquisition, and short-term loans. As YBP Library Service’s preferred e-book partner, ebrary’s titles are available in GOBI™, as well as YBP’s Approval and Demand Driven Acquisition (DDA) service. ebrary is the only e-book provider that enables customers to upload and integrate their own digital materials right from their computers with DASH!™ (Data Sharing, Fast) technology as well as apply cross-referencing with multiple online resources with InfoTools™ technology. The company also offers a dedicated mobile app for the iPad®, iPhone® and iPod touch®. A ProQuest® business, ebrary is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, USA.

Apple, iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc.

As London Online goes into full swing, ProQuest is distributing plenty of interesting news in conjunction with the show. Among the highlights in this year’s press pack:
• Our support of serious research into popular culture gets a boost from the new Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive. Millions of pages of full-color digital images from more than 30 quintessential chronicles of music, movies, and more are captured in this new product. Read about it here: http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/505503
• France is providing support for research into the early modern period with a unique, national agreement with ProQuest that will provide EEBO through all research institutions in France and its territories. Details are in the attachment. (ProQuest and ABES 11-29-11)
• Dialog is again honoring librarians who elevate the role of information service in their organizations by identifying two more InfoStars. Read about the librarians who are making a difference in the attachment. (InfoStars 2011)
• Content from the Wellcome Library, part of ProQuest Early European Books digitization program, makes its debut and there are some wild and wacky works coming to a website near you. Take a look below to learn how science fact and fantasy happily coexisted in early modern times.
Medicine Meets Monsters in ProQuest’s Digital Version of Wellcome Library’s
Early Book Collection
From groundbreaking anatomical texts to witches’ brews, early science books made available online

November 29, 2011 (Ann Arbor, Mich.) — In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein becomes inspired in his search for the “elixir of life” after turning his back on modern scientific theory and instead studying the “wild fancies” of three ancient authors: Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, the 16th-century German occult philosopher, Paracelsus, a 16th-century Swiss physician and alchemist, and Albertus Magnus, a 13th-century Bavarian bishop who, according to legend, created an automaton that could answer questions put to it. The works of these three authors, together with many more in the areas of alchemy, astrology, demonology and pseudo-science, are all held in the Wellcome Library’s holdings of rare books related to the history of medicine. The world-renowned collection is now being digitized by ProQuest — an information company central to research — and, beginning this month, is freely available to all users in the U.K.

In all, more than 15,000 rare books published between 1485 and 1700 are being digitized. This period saw the publication of many of the first authoritative works of modern science, such as illustrated works of anatomy by Andreas Vesalius, Salomon Alberti and Caspar Bartholin, and groundbreaking texts such as Jean Beguin’s 1615 book Les elemens de Chymie, which contained the first ever chemical equation. But it was also a period in which modern scientific methods based on precise observation, classification and experiment happily co-existed with folk wisdom and fantasy. For example, the 11-volume Historia animalum by Ulisse Aldrovandi, one of the founders of modern zoology, is an encyclopedic work full of realistic illustrations of animals and plants drawn from life, in which mythical creatures such as dragons, hydras and centaurs appear alongside their real-life counterparts.

The first batch of 400 books which are now available also includes numerous examples of the “Book of Secrets,” such as The Secrets of Alexis of Piedmont (1555). Alexis was the pseudonym of an Italian physician and alchemist whose book was a compendium of recipes for medicines, household remedies, perfumes, dyes and experiments. Among them is a witch’s brew for the cure of gout, which involves boiling the whole carcass of a red-haired dog. These books were extremely popular and frequently translated and reprinted, as were books of prodigies such as Pierre Boaistuau’s Histoires prodigieuses (1568), an illustrated catalog of monsters, demons, deformities, natural disasters and miraculous events. Other illustrated works include books on falconry, military machinery, plants of the New World, and a fascinating 1568 volume with more than 130 woodcuts by Jöst Amman depicting trades and professions of the day, from the Pope and King down to the physician, bookbinder, clockmaker, brewer and barber.

The Wellcome is the fourth major library to participate in ProQuest’s groundbreaking project to expand and preserve access to primary sources of European history. ProQuest launched the project with the Danish Royal Library, Copenhagen and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze in Italy, and has already made these rich national collections available to all Danish and Italian citizens, while a third digitization operation has recently started at the National Library of the Netherlands. In all cases, ProQuest sets up a scanning studio on site at the library and uses state-of-the-art technology to create high-definition color images of every page, including bindings and fold-outs.

Through the Early European Books project, ProQuest is building an increasingly comprehensive survey of printing in Europe to 1700 by digitizing and bringing together the holdings of major rare book libraries. To learn more visit www.proquest.com.

About ProQuest (www.proquest.com)
ProQuest connects people with vetted, reliable information. Key to serious research, the company has forged a 70-year reputation as a gateway to the world’s knowledge – from dissertations to governmental and cultural archives to news, in all its forms. Its role is essential to libraries and other organizations whose missions depend on the management and delivery of complete, trustworthy information.

ProQuest’s massive information pool is made accessible in research environments that accelerate productivity, empowering users to discover, create, and share knowledge.

An energetic, fast-growing organization, ProQuest includes the Bowker®, Dialog®, ebrary®, and Serials Solutions® businesses and notable research tools such as RefWorks™, Pivot™, and the Summon™ service. The company is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with offices around the world.