The Statewide Database Licensing Project at the Washington State Library has had a long-term relationship with the ProQuest company, as ProQuest has held the contract for the SDL project since its inception in 1997. Recently, Library Journal interviewed ProQuest CEO Marty Kahn about current and future directions for the company.

Kahn discusses, among other things, ProQuest’s current partnership with Google to digitize millions of pages of historical newspapers from ProQuest’s microfilm vaults.

One of the more interesting things that Kahn says is in response to a suggestion that “A lot of research shows that people are satisfied with what they find on Google.” Said Kahn in response:

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.

Kahn also discusses the new ProQuest/Serial Solutions product, Summon, which takes traditional federated search technology to an entirely new level, with metadata from participating vendors all co-indexed up front, to avoid the delayed response and other problems inherit in previous federated search solutions. Kahn stressed that Summon

“. . . 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.”

Read the entire interview online at LJ or from the ProQuest database (authentication required).