Online Databases- Ingenta Grows in the U.S. Market

Earlier this year the UK company Ingenta changed its name from "ingenta" (with a small "i") to "Ingenta" (with a big "I") to avoid confusion with its web address and online system (ingenta.com). The company hopes this change is symbolic of making it big in the United States.

Ingenta is still a youngster in the library market—it was founded in 1998 and opened its first U.S. office in Cambridge, MA, in 1999. It focuses on providing access to scientific and research literature to academic and corporate libraries. Recent acquisitions and partnership strategies reflect this focus. Ingenta made its first big splash in the library world in 2000 when it purchased UnCover, followed by CatchWord in 2001. At the American Library Association's Midwinter Meeting in January, Ingenta and Gale Group announced a new partnership that will bring even more visibility to Ingenta by associating it with Gale's InfoTrac system.

Gale's InfoTrac databases (www.gale.com) are some of the most popular full-text sources in academic and public libraries, with customers in over 100 countries. InfoTrac OneFile and Expanded Academic, the most comprehensive InfoTrac products, index more than 3000 and 7500 sources and provide full-text articles from about 1800 and 4000 journal titles, respectively.

OneFile includes the items that are in Expanded Academic, but it also includes indexing and full text from all other InfoTrac databases. OneFile was first offered in 2000 specifically to attract library consortia. Consortia must serve diverse types and sizes of libraries, so Gale assembled all of its more targeted databases to offer one solution for all. OneFile includes indexing and full text for journals that cover specific topics such as health, business, and news, in addition to general periodicals, and it offers a 20-year back file. Besides consortia, academic libraries or large public libraries have become customers.

Although some scholarly journals are included in Expanded Academic or OneFile, coverage in InfoTrac is strongest for general periodicals, newsletters, and trade journals. This is where Ingenta comes in.

Ingenta's strength lies in providing indexing and full text from peer-reviewed research journals. Ingenta's database includes indexing from over 26,000 sources, with full text from approximately 5400 journal titles from 170 publishers. These are heavily weighted to scholarly titles in sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. Publishers include Academic Press, MIT Press, Blackwell Science, John Wiley, SAGE, and many British technical societies. Since only 100 of Ingenta's titles overlap with the titles found in InfoTrac, Ingenta provides a natural complement to Gale's InfoTrac databases, particularly in the academic market.

The Ingenta-InfoTrac databases—InfoTrac OneFile Plus and Expanded Academic Plus—will be available this summer as InfoTrac Plus. In the meantime, InfoTrac Web provides links to Ingenta journal articles for current InfoTrac customers. When fully implemented, the system will provide integrated searching of the InfoTrac and Ingenta content through the InfoTrac Web interface. Existing customers of InfoTrac OneFile or Expanded Academic will receive a free upgrade to InfoTrac Plus, while existing Ingenta customers must become InfoTrac customers to use the service.

Subscribers to the databases will be able to search bibliographic information from InfoTrac and Ingenta at the same time, but access to Ingenta's full text will be based on each library's periodical subscriptions. If an article is retrieved in full text, but from a journal that the library does not subscribe to, users can purchase the individual article on a pay-per-view (PPV) basis. PPV articles are often provided in digital format, but for some titles the article will be faxed (or provided through the Ariel document delivery system for those libraries that use it).

Between now and the summer launch date of InfoTrac Plus, much must be done to make Ingenta's records compatible with those in InfoTrac. Gale subject headings will be assigned to the Ingenta bibliographic records through a combination of automatic and manual indexing procedures. This way, records that originate with Gale or those that originate with Ingenta will be compatible and fully integrated in an InfoTrac search.

This agreement has advantages for both companies. Ingenta's full-text coverage makes InfoTrac much more appealing to academic librarians and faculty, many of whom have worried that the InfoTrac full-text titles were not scholarly enough for serious research. Users typically give InfoTrac's interface high marks for ease of use, but faculty and librarians aren't always as positive about the quality of the articles retrieved.

Mark Rowse, CEO of Ingenta, said that because the companies traditionally serve different types of libraries, this partnership extends the customer base of both. Ingenta is used most by "research libraries and graduate schools, whereas InfoTrac's general reference database has a relatively higher share of the four-year colleges and public libraries."

Publishers whose journals are made available by Ingenta will benefit from wider exposure to a worldwide audience through InfoTrac. Since payment is based on subscriptions or PPV, the publishers also will get higher revenues one way or another.

According to Beth Dempsey, director of marketing for Gale, the agreement with Ingenta is the latest (and largest) extension of Gale's product strategy over the past several years, which has been "to seamlessly integrate varied data in one interface." The combination of Ingenta's e-journals with Gale's periodical databases will allow users to access almost 10,000 journals via the single InfoTrac interface.

This agreement exemplifies the trend to provide access to as much full text as possible in many different formats and means. Gale and Ingenta both recently adopted the SFX open URL standard that allows links to and between documents and can better integrate linking with each library's subscriptions. In addition, Dempsey pointed out that Gale introduced MARC records with Infomarks, allowing searchers to link from their OPAC to relevant information within InfoTrac Web and "a web-based links-to-holdings feature to search library holdings from InfoTrac." According to Rowse, the two companies will work together to add functionality and services such as linking, library configuration, and easier online administration.

Future products will be more specialized than the massive OneFile and Expanded Academic files. They will include integration of the Ingenta titles into Gale's Resource Centers, which integrate multiple types of electronic publications, including bibliographic and full-text databases, directories, biographies, and other reference sources in a subject-focused collection. Resource Centers focus either on topics (such as history, health and wellness, biography, or literature) or on customers (e.g., school libraries, small colleges, universities, the public). Ingenta's Rowse said Ingenta will be "developing new services suited for particular subject areas or niche markets."

Many librarians first heard of Ingenta when the company purchased UnCover in 2000. UnCover was revolutionary in its day as one of the first systems to offer shared indexing, free online searching of bibliographic data, and pay-per-use document delivery by a variety of modes. Ingenta follows that model.

UnCover and ingenta.com were run as separate databases as work on integrating the services into a single search service progressed. UnCover users can now register for and search the full ingenta/UnCover file, which indexes over 25,000 publications (approximately 5400 of which are in full text) and provides document delivery via FAX, Ariel, or online. UnCover's Reveal current awareness profile services are still available to provide customized runs of the full database.

In 2001, Ingenta made another major acquisition: CatchWord. CatchWord was Ingenta's largest British competitor in the research article delivery business and data conversion services for publishers. The ingenta.com database is now actually a merger of Ingenta, UnCover, and CatchWord. By absorbing the competition, Ingenta grew in just a few years into a huge online database and document delivery service for research literature.

Ingenta not only sells articles to libraries, it also works with publishers to get their scholarly articles converted and ready to distribute online. Services to publishers include data conversion, online hosting, and distribution. Ingenta makes the agreements with publishers and will honor them in this new venture, hence the restrictions on full-text access to subscribing libraries that will be brought to InfoTrac Plus.

The InfoTrac partnership likely will bring a big jump in business for Ingenta and for the articles it makes available. Already, Ingenta reports that its collection is accessed by over 3.5 million researchers and librarians a month through its own web site and other services.

Rowse said that Ingenta works with "dozens of other aggregators, A&I services, and subscription agents," but the Gale agreement is significant. "Ingenta concluded that Gale was the best partner of all the aggregators, given its scale and market position."

The Gale-Ingenta partnership makes InfoTrac a more competitive product in the academic library market. Competitors like EBSCO and ProQuest have the most to lose. Their full-text products have fared well with academic librarians because they offer a better mix of scholarly and general materials. Now, all of a sudden, InfoTrac is in this mix.

Ingenta has done more than add new journals and ways to access them. In 1999, the company established a nonprofit foundation that sponsors research and an annual research institute. Topics for both research and the institute so far have covered use of electronic information services in distance education and user behavior in the scholarly research process and, specifically, use of scholarly journals. (Papers are available at www.ingenta.com; click on "about ingenta.")

The 2002 research institute will focus on issues surrounding licensing, including research papers on licensing preferences of both publishers and librarians. The research papers will be presented at a one-day conference held at MIT in September and again at the Royal Society of London in October.

It is difficult to characterize Ingenta. It focuses on distributing published scientific, professional, and academic research literature, so in one sense it is a document delivery company. It provides bibliographic information for many more articles than it delivers online in full text, so it's also a database company.

Approximately 60 percent of its customers are in academia, with corporations the next largest segment. Although it began in Europe and is still rated as one of the UK's top 20 web services, as of 2002 more than 60 percent of Ingenta's business comes from the United States. So, it is part e-subscription agent, part article vendor, part document delivery company, and part online service provider.

It probably doesn't matter how Ingenta is categorized—in just a few years, the company has grown swiftly and made a mark on the scholarly information marketplace. From all indications, this growth will continue in 2002.