Today We Became a ProQuest Company - Stephen Rhind-Tutt
As I hope all of you know now, this morning we joined ProQuest.
I want to take a moment to share my feelings about this with you.
Alexander Street was founded to ‘make silent voices heard’. We wanted to build a company that ferreted out rare, hard-to-find, previously unavailable materials and made them useful and engaging to scholars and students. And this is what we’ve done. We were the first company to sell streaming music and video into libraries, we were the first to publish primary source in counseling and engineering and to do film scripts and comics for libraries. From the Black Panther Party Newspaper to Sixty Minutes we’ve found great material and brought it to libraries.
Each of these initiatives expanded Alexander Street. As I write we’re approaching 4,000 customers in over 60 countries. We have close to 150 products. We’re seeing more and more interest in what we do. We’re no longer a small company. It is time for us to graduate.
Some months ago Andy Snyder – Chairman of ProQuest – convinced me that we could do far more together than apart. He talked of how ProQuest could accelerate and expand the vision for Alexander Street; how we could grow the audience for its materials; how areas like music, literature, film and video would be hugely enhanced by being together. I saw the value of joining forces.
So today Alexander Street becomes a ProQuest Company. It’s not an ending for Alexander Street, but a graduation. It will allow us further to thrive in areas like nursing, business, engineering where our current presence is small. It’ll allow us to create next generation resources in music, literature and other areas of the humanities that will delight faculty and students as never before. It will allow us to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure. It will enable us to build on rather than dilute our mission.
On behalf of all the investors, I want to take this opportunity deeply to thank all of your for bringing us this far and invite you to help take us to the next level with ProQuest!
- Stephen Rhind-Tutt