ANN ARBOR, Mich., November 29, 2011 - ProQuest and the Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education (ABES) in France have signed a sweeping new national license agreement that will enable all research and educational institutions throughout France and French territories to access Early English Books Online (EEBO). The agreement will provide researchers with access to digitized pages from more than 125,000 early printed books, transforming research into the early modern period. It also includes 25,000 fully searchable editions of texts produced by the EEBO Text Creation Partnership, enabling end-users to trace the usage of words and phrases across more than two centuries of printed texts.

"This is a moment of genuine pride for us at ProQuest," said Mary Sauer-Games, ProQuest Senior Vice-President, Publishing. "France was at the heart of cultural, political and intellectual life during the early modern period, and we're confident access to EEBO will provide new insights and open new avenues of enquiry for French historians."

"ProQuest's EEBO is one of the very first resources negotiated under a national license by ABES," said Raymond Bérard, Director of ABES. "This is an innovative project in its extent, since the database will be made accessible not only to all French universities and research organizations, but also to all public libraries."

ProQuest's renowned database of literary and historical classics from the pre-1700 period is considered the seminal research resource for early modern scholarship. Users in France will access the works through the dedicated EEBO interface, which allows the content to be precision searched by keyword, author, title, or subject. Users can also create Boolean queries and limit searches to specific sources, languages, or collections. Content from the Text Creation Partnership includes searchable, ASCII full-text versions of 25,000 of the documents. Further, the inclusion of MARC records will provide seamless links from the library's OPAC to corresponding images in EEBO.

The agreement is the culmination of a long-standing relationship between ProQuest, the academic and library communities in the social sciences and humanities in France, and the national consortia Couperin, begun in 2002. It reflects ProQuest's deep commitment to supporting serious research in the region.

About ABES
ABES was created in 1994 to design and manage documentation IT systems and applications. It implemented the Sudoc (union catalog of libraries in higher education), Calames (Online catalog of archives and manuscripts in higher education) and most recently, Thèses.fr, the search engine of French PhD theses. Since 2002 it has diversified its activities in several areas, including the mutualisation of electronic resource purchases, for which it works closely with the consortium Couperin (University consortium of digital publications).

ABES has been commissioned by the Ministry of Higher Education and Research in France to negotiate and acquire resources in the form of national licenses. Its aim is to provide access to an unparalleled body of information resources that can be acquired through a voluntary program of purchases, providing the research community with higher education and research services with high added value.

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 delivery of complete, trustworthy information.

ProQuest's massive information pool is accessible through the all-new ProQuest^® platform, which moves beyond navigation to empower researchers to use, create, and share content—accelerating research productivity.

This energetic, fast-growing organization includes the Summon^™ web-scale discovery service, the new ProQuest Dialog^™ service, and business units ebrary^®, Serials Solutions^®, RefWorks-COS^™, and Bowker^®.