The Merger of the Century: EBSCO Acquires H. W. Wilson
PrintIn a surprise announcement June 2, two of the leading names in digital reference publishing told their library customers that they have merged to strengthen the value of their databases and print resources. EBSCO Publishing, a subsidiary of EBSCO Industries founded in 1944 and headquartered in Ipswich, Massachusetts, has acquired the staff and product lines of the H. W. Wilson Company, founded in 1898 and located in the Bronx, New York, since 1917. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
H. W. Wilson President and CEO Harry Regan said of the merger, “EBSCO and H. W. Wilson have been engaged as business partners for a number of years and are now officially operating as one. The result will be a broader and deeper range of products and services for the library reference community with significantly added value.”
In a FAQ describing the move, EBSCO said that the “vast majority of Wilson databases will continue to be maintained, and there are many planned enhancements. Some Wilson databases will be merged together with closely related EBSCO databases to create more robust versions.”
EBSCO Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing Sam Brooks told American Libraries that the company’s goal is to have the Wilson databases available through its EBSCOhost platform by December 31. “Our plan is to release new, more comprehensive products in early 2012 covering applied sciences, art, biography, education, humanities, law, and library science,” he said. “Our customers will have the choice to continue to subscribe to the Wilson version, continue to subscribe to the EBSCO version, or to upgrade to the more comprehensive, merged EBSCO/Wilson version."
EBSCO expects to discontinue very few of the existing Wilson databases, and when that does happen, customers will be upgraded to an enhanced Wilson version at no additional charge. The FAQ mentions that all current subscriptions to Wilson print books will be fulfilled by EBSCO’s subsidiary, Salem Press. However, print resources that have experienced a decline in interest levels from librarians may eventually be discontinued. Brooks added that they are “not looking to make substantial cutbacks here and will let market demand for these products drive decisions.”
The well-respected Wilson thesauri will be merged into the EBSCO thesaurus, which will improve the subject indexing in many of the databases. Wilson’s precise and abundant subject terms are expected to enhance EBSCO customers’ search results.
“Further,” Brooks told AL, “WilsonWeb has a great feature that will be added to EBSCOhost. WilsonWeb keyword searches match against their controlled vocabularies and return results from ‘use for’ terms. For example, a keyword search for Burma also returns results for Myanmar, because Myanmar is a ‘use for’ term for Burma.” That functionality will be added to all EBSCO databases as well as to the EBSCO Discovery Service, the company’s unified index application that searches across an institution’s EBSCOhost database holdings as well as such partner databases as Alexander Street Press, LexisNexis, NewsBank, and Readex.
An as-yet-to-be-determined number of Wilson’s 200+ employees in the Bronx and Dublin, Ireland, will eventually join EBSCO’s 800 workers at the Ipswich facility. “All H. W. Wilson employees are now EBSCO employees,” Brooks said.
The H. W. Wilson Foundation will remain a separate entity and plans to continue its mission of supporting libraries and librarianship with the annual John Cotton Dana Library Public Relations Awards, cosponsored with ALA’s Library Leadership and Management Association division. Wilson has provided support for these awards since their inception in 1946. EBSCO plans to take over sponsorship of the Library Staff Development Grant that Wilson has been supporting.
Former ALA Executive Director Robert Wedgeworth pays tribute to the legacy of the H. W. Wilson Company in a companion article.
American Libraries, Fri, 06/03/2011 - 15:40
American Libraries Magazine | 50 East Huron | Chicago, IL 60611 | 2013© American Library Association | Staff Login
Comments
E-Publishing
The merger is such a good move. I just hope that it is good too for both of its employees. Is Google using these e-libraries too?
HW WILSON
The Board of Directors of HW Wilson Publishing has sold out many ideologies. Mr Wilson was the founder of a company that was for the good of all the people in his time this made him a classic. It is sad to see that material gain has brought a good institution to it’s knees a company that for many years supported our countries libraries with exceptional product and exceptional personalized service . It treated it’s employees with fairness and consideration and respect and then all of that began to change. Was it in fact the company losing profits that caused this autrocity or was it simply a greed so differant from the frugal man who shared his dream with those around him. In any case they have sold out their supporting public to a giant who has little regard for the 200 dedicated employees they have so callously tossed away and as far as regard for their library customers well let me say business is business dear friends
Ebsco's treatment of former H.W. Wilson workers
Although it is still using the H.W. Wilson name and reputation, Ebsco has closed both the New York and Dublin, Ireland, offices of the H.W. Wilson Company. This has meant the loss of over 40 jobs in Dublin and the vast majority of the New York staff have also been made redundant. Ebsco has refused outright to abide by a recommendation from the Irish Labour Court that the Dublin ex-employees should be given more than the minimum payment required by law, especially given that Ebsco/Wilsons can claim back 60 per cent of the payment as a rebate. The vast majority of companies, whether U.S. or European, abide by the recommendations of the Labour Court, which is a very important and respected institution in Ireland. We are all very saddened by Ebsco’s stance and would ask all librarians, students and other readers to send a brief email to Ebsco indicating their displeasure at the company’s treatment of the Dublin staff they made redundant and asking them to abide by the Irish Labour Court’s recommendation.
Members of the ALA should
Members of the ALA should also be aware that many of the employees at H. W. Wilson’s Dublin office held doctorates in their specialized subjects and many of those that were made redundant had served the company with great loyalty for well over a decade. These people were demonstrable experts, and it was with pride that they produced a quality product for Wilson’s. To dismiss them with nothing but the barest legal minimum redundancy package [most of which, as stated in the message above, is not even paid for by Ebsco anyway and is also substantially below the industry norm for workers in this profession] is really quite shameful behaviour by Ebsco. Takeovers and redundancies are a fact of life: but they should still be done with an element of humanity for those taking it at the sharp end. And Ebsco could easily have treated the Dublin Wilson staff better.
employees
what would be at stake for the employees of both companies, will all they be accomodated by the merged company?
Ebsco/Wilson database merger
I think this merger will bear good fruit. Searching will be more effective and should yield more relevant results. In an age when libraries are forced to compete with the likes of Google, this brings us one step closer to keeping up. Now, if only some tech company out there could just design a web 3.0 catalog that had the power to search the metadata trapped in the MARC record with a single-search box like Google that would yield relevant results… Ah, one must live in hope ;-)
Public Good??????
They did state the price will increase…….this is not good for libraries period. especially at a time when we can least afford it.
H. W. Wilson
Inundated with nostalgia, thinking of my days at H. W. Wilson, that funky old industrial building with its faux lighthouse, the river below, Yankee Stadium down the block for a lunchtime bleacher visit. It was a world apart, though given a respectful nod by the chic Manhattan publishing world.
Art Plotnik, formerly editor, The Wilson Library Bulletin
the broader "search" environment
I imagine that this merger will be of greatest benefit to the corporate lawyers at Google, Inc. Now the Internet giant has merely one acquisition to make instead of two.
Anti-trust
As the ongoing consolidation continues at breakneck pace, the question is: When do the anti-trust lawyers need to get involved? If these were banks or airlines, government regulators would be involved. Consolidation will eventually, if not already, be contrary to the public good.
Public Good
Unless the company is going to increase their price I don’t think it is an issue. It seems to me that this is a good thing for library customers since there will be more uniformity in the search engines that they use searching library databases.
Ebsco could act like a monopoly and increase prices but they can only go so far when there customers are publicly funded and have limited budget. They sell a specialized product to a specialized set of customers. I don’t think that the public good is threatened the general social sense of the term.
Post new comment