Through its Serials Solutions business, ProQuest has been engaged in the development of Intota, its new library services platform announced in June 2011. Intota, designed specifically for academic libraries, is intended to provide compressive recourse management capabilities for print and electronic materials, leveraging the knowledgebase-driven approach underlying it Summon discovery service and its 360 suite of electronic resource management tools. The design and strategy of what was later branded as Intota was covered in the August 2011 issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter.
ProQuest announced the availability of Intota Assessment, a collection analysis service, in November 2013. Intota Assessment is positioned as a comprehensive tool to support collection development decisions through circulation data from the library's local ILS, COUNTER statistics, and from quantitative data from Books in Print, Ulrich's, and other resources. The service spans both print and electronic items, providing a variety of reports and metrics, such as the cost per use, overlap of items within competing collection packages, and subject strengths relative to peer institutions. Intota Assessment is based on a new technology platform and represents the initial component of its upcoming library services platform.
Other components of Intota are expected in early 2014 with the full platform expected to be complete by the end of 2014. Early adopting libraries are part of the Intota Beta Partner Program, and Intota Assessment customers have the option to migrate to the platform as it becomes available.
With competing products in the library services platform genre now available and seeing widespread implementation in libraries, ProQuest faces a significant challenge given its later timetable for delivery. By making Intota Assessment available now, ProQuest meets a pressing need of libraries for collection analytics and the ability to migrate to its full library services platform later. ProQuest has established a strong reputation for its knowledgebase-driven products. It will count on libraries' confidence in those products convincing them to wait for Intota, rather than going to a competing product that may be available earlier. Given academic libraries' relatively slow adoption of new automation systems, a large portion of the market will still be in the selection process by the time that Intota is complete.
