ProQuest yesterday announced the launch of ProQuest One Academic, a new resource that utilizes a single user interface to offer access to the full collection of journals, newspapers, magazines, and other content in the ProQuest Central database; every ebook in the Academic Complete collection; the 66,000 streaming videos included in Alexander Street’s Academic Video Online collection; and nearly five million graduate works in the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global database.

“Some of the key difficulties related to the research process are getting started, defining a topic, finding appropriate resources, determining the credibility of those resources, and integrating information from them,” Rafael Sidi, SVP and general manager, ProQuest Information Solutions, told LJ. By streamlining access to these four major databases through one platform, “students and faculty will save tremendous time by finding the most comprehensive and curated content without the need to go to different platforms to find videos or books for teaching or learning.”

Switching between different platforms to search for different content has traditionally been a “pain point” for researchers, Sidi said. Less experienced researchers may be unfamiliar with the content available in multiple databases and could be frustrated with the need to navigate a variety of user interfaces. And even seasoned researchers are forced to use multiple windows and tabs when conducting a comprehensive search of these different resources.

ProQuest Central, Academic Complete, Academic Video Online, and ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global will still be available for licensing individually, noted Brie Betz, global director of product management for ProQuest. But the work that the company’s developers have done to simplify access and present integrated search results with the ProQuest One Academic platform is a key benefit. Libraries and database providers “are competing against the open web,” Betz said. Users “expect to be able to find the right information as quickly as possible.”

Sidi described “extensive research with students and faculty” to design the layout of the search results page. Features include a sidebar that presents the most relevant ebooks and videos related to a search, making it “easier for users to discover content they might not otherwise have engaged with,” he said.

Also, user testing and analytics indicates that “researchers usually improve the relevancy of their results when they use the various filters on the search results page. But while more advanced researchers had no trouble with these filters, less-experienced researchers were either unaware of them or didn’t use them,” Sidi said. So, following user testing with undergraduate students, ProQuest’s developers took the most-used filter—which enables users to limit results by source type—and placed it directly above the search box on the basic search page.

There will be no loss of administrative functionality on the back end, Betz said—library staff will have access to the same management and reporting features for each platform, as well as features such as media upload capabilities in Academic Video Online, for example. However, Betz said that ProQuest One Academic will ease administrative burdens by consolidating licensing, configuration, management, and training onto a single platform.

In an official announcement on January 23, the company described ProQuest One Academic as the first product in a larger ProQuest One initiative, which will be “a series of solutions that will enable libraries to serve broad, evolving learning and research mandates faster and more powerfully, ultimately improving outcomes for their institutions.”

Sidi added that ProQuest One Academic “is just the beginning of the innovation that we will be bringing to our aggregation business. We will continue to enrich our content and develop new solutions with the best user experience and workflow tools.”