Pro-Quest International Powerpages:
Pro-Quest International Powerpages is another full-text journal database on CD-ROM, offered commercially by the publisher UMI. The UMI(formely University Microfilms International) was the first commercial publisher of microforms , which provided microfilm version of scholarly publications to libraries for archival purposes and document delivery.
Pro-Quest International is actually based on three separate services, namely, Business Periodicals on Disk (BPO), General Periodicals on Disk (GPO) and Social Sciences Index Full-text (SSE-FT). The pattern for each service is the same. Each of the three takes an existing bibliographic database and provides full text back-up via images on CD-ROM to most heavily requested periodicals in the database. BPO is based on the ABI Inform database and provides full-text coverage of 500 of the 11,000 titles indexed in ABI Inform. GPO is a selection of 400 titles out of 1650 titles in Periodical Abstracts and SSI-FT provides cover to-cover scan of 200 titles from H.W.Wilson Social Sciences Index. In all the cases full-text on CD-ROM is based on cover-to-cover scans of the periodicals. Power pages service is available to the subscribers for running on stand-alone single workstation (consisting of personal computer with CD-ROM drive and laser printer) or on network environment. Prices for the networked service vary with the size and specification of the network. However, full-text document images are not viewable from remote locations. The users on the network can search the bibliographic database, select the references and place the order for print-outs of the articles from a central print station.