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 bui
