"EBSCO Publishing acquired the venerable H.W. Wilson company late Wednesday. Financial details of the transaction were not available. EBSCO Publishing executives met with the Wilson team at their headquarters in the Bronx, NY, and a series of meetings will be held between management teams today and Friday, and more over the coming weeks.
Wilson operates a similar business to EBSCO offering abstract/index records and fulltext databases via its proprietary platform, Wilson Web, but it is a much smaller company with about 200 employees and sales that are less than 10 percent of EBSCO's.
Databases from Wilson will be integrated with EBSCOhost over the coming months, and, eventually, the WilsonWeb platform will be eliminated, the companies said in a press release. EBSCO will maintain WilsonWeb until all Wilson databases are available on EBSCOhost and customers have been transitioned to EBSCOhost. The company anticipates maintaining the platform until December 2011. Customers of databases on WilsonWeb will be given concurrent access to databases on both platforms as these become available."
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Friday, June 03, 2011
EBSCO Publishing Acquires H.W. Wilson Company
From: Library Journal
Did any rightsholders of content in Wilson databases opt out of allowing their content to be integrated within EBSCOhost?
ReplyDeleteI honestly have no idea, but that is a very interesting question. I have predicted for some time that as soon as, as you refer to them, "rightsholders" realize that with the ubiquitous web they don't need aggregators like EBSCO or Wilson and can market directly to individual users like you and me and our students, the entire "database" market will crumble.I predict we will "buy" individua; pieces of information as needed.
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