Talk:ProQuest/Archives/2014

serials solutions merger
Tools vs Content! With due respect for the suggestion of merging I believe that if you examine the context of operation of Serials Solutions in association with Proquest you will find that although Proquest owns Serials Solutions they have done nothing to absorb it. It has not absorbed any of the products, operations, or branding.

Serials Solutions provides research tools to most colleges in the U.S. while ProQuest provides Electronic Journal Content. --71.37.23.140 03:43, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

I believe that rather than being merged into this article, the Serials Solutions article should be deleted completely. It gives me no pertinent information besides the fact that the founders saw a good business opportunity and one of them once worked as a librarian. The company does not seem worthy of an encyclopedia. -- 05:42, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

I disagree completely that the Serials Solutions entry should be deleted. The company exists, and provides products that are used by many libraries around the world. In making reference to library technologies, reference to Serials Solutions and other companies that are key to this is essential. Also, I believe that this entry should be separate from ProQuest because Serials Solutions, while owned by ProQuest, operates independently from ProQuest operations with its own staff. --Brennx0r 04:56, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

I also disagree with the proposal that Serials Solutions article should be deleted completely. I came to the ProQuest article knowing nothing about Serials Solutions, followed the link through the Serials Solutions and was fascinated by the story. I was interested in enough in the subject to track down the original PDF of the history of that librarian who started Serials Solutions. It was absolutely relevant (for me). Just one opinion, of course. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.211.139.190 (talk) 17:06, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Article has improved but is still a horrible mess
It looks like it was either written by a PR flack or was written by a neutral third party but sourced only to ProQuest's own PR rather than balancing with research in outside sources.

This is why I strongly dislike marketers in the information research field. They have a really, really bad habit of trying to, as PR people say, "put lipstick on the pig" by making their field sound really glamorous with lots of vague terminology. The result is to obfuscate rather than to communicate. In the case of this article, the worst obfuscation comes through the repeated use of the terms "resources" and "tools" as vague references to the unglamorous business of running gigantic databases. All that does is bewilder newcomers to online research (especially children) and it irritates experienced librarians and researchers.

What's really sad is that such obfuscation is unnecessary, as the massive size and depth of ProQuest's databases already serves to differentiate it from the competition. --Coolcaesar (talk) 06:56, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Merge from University Microfilms International
After looking at both articles University Microfilms International contained very little that wasn't in this article, so I unilaterally decided to merge the two here. this version contains the original of that article prior to the merge. Peter Flass (talk) 13:48, 10 September 2014 (UTC)