The Ancestry Library Edition

Earlier today I posted the announcement of the availability of Ancestry® Library Edition at Brigham Young University. The Ancestry® Library Edition (ALE) is a product of Ancestry.com that is distributed by ProQuest. The name ProQuest was first used in 1995 as a product name and became a company name in 2001 when Bell & Howell Information and Learning adopted it as their name, according to the company's website. Temporarily "ProQuest CSA" after a February 2007 merger of ProQuest Information and Learning and CSA, the new company has recently chosen to continue doing business as ProQuest and has introduced a new logo: ProQuest markets Ancestry Library Edition as "one of the most important genealogical collections available today. It has unparalleled coverage of the United States and the United Kingdom, including census, vital, church, court, and immigration records, as well as record collections from Canada and other areas. This collection, with thousands of databases and billions of names, is essential to having a broad genealogy collection." ProQuest positions ALE as "a strong complement" to its own HeritageQuest Online™, which it obtained in 2001. To protect its own library products, ProQuest excludes from ALE some databases normally present to Ancestry.com subscribers:

• Newspapers
• Obituary Collections
• Family and Local History Books obtained from ProQuest (20,000 titles)
• Passenger and Immigration List Index (PILI)
• Biography & Genealogy Master Index (BGMI)
• PERiodical Source Index (PERSI)

Ancestry excludes most of its tree-based offerings because they are geared to individual subscribers:

• Public and private member trees
• Member tree photos and stories
• OneWorldTree

Otherwise, the Ancestry Library Edition is an extremely complete offering of the databases available in Ancestry's World Deluxe subscription.