Ebsco Acquires H.W. Wilson

Generations of law students cut their research teeth on the Index to Legal Periodicals . On June 1, its publisher the H.W. Wilson Company and EBSCO Publishing announced a merger, under the EBSCO Publishing banner.

The Wilson controlled vocabularies will be integrated into EBSCO’s controlled vocabularies, resulting in improved subject indexing for EBSCOdatabases. The EBSCOhost® platform will be enhanced to take advantage of this indexing in its search and relevancy ranking algorithms.

As the Library Journal reports:

Wilson operates a similar business to EBSCO offering abstract/index records and fulltext databases via its proprietary platform, Wilson Web, but it is a much smaller company with about 200 employees and sales that are less than 10 percent of EBSCO’s.

Databases from Wilson will be integrated with EBSCOhost over the coming months, and, eventually, the WilsonWeb platform will be eliminated, the companies said in a press release. EBSCO will maintain WilsonWeb until all Wilson databases are available on EBSCOhost and customers have been transitioned to EBSCOhost. The company anticipates maintaining the platform until December 2011. Customers of databases on WilsonWeb will be given concurrent access to databases on both platforms as these become available.

Speaking personally, I use LegalTrac about twenty times more frequently than the Index to Legal Periodicals. Is this a typical experience?