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Questia Media Services offers tired college researchers just what they need to write, cite and compliment their research papers, and from the comfort of their own dorm room, house or apartment. The service offers 24-hour a day access to more than 50,000 journals, books and periodicals covering a broad array of humanities and social science topics, all online and available for a small subscription fee. And in the world of the Internet, Questia is just a baby.
Joining online research sites like www.netLibrary.com and www.ebrary.com, questia.com hopes to do more for students by providing even more options. Founded by 28-year-old Troy Williams, Questia is a Houston, Texas based operation which has achieved notoriety and assistance from libraries, publishing houses, online corporations and educational institutions across the country.
Williams hopes to accomplish many things from the January launching of this Web site including making it easier for students to access large amounts of text at a low cost and throught their computers.
“That’s when the idea of a massive online library of books came to me,” Williams writes in his history of the company. “It would have 250,000 books, classics as well as books published throughout the 20th century. The books would be interlinked through their footnotes and bibliographies, allowing users to seamlessly jump from a page in one book to a page in another. It would enable users to create personal work space, to highlight and annotate books, to create links between pages of different books as well as access reference works with a single click,” he said.
And with more than 15 million college students in the United States at more than 3,800 universities and colleges, the online service removes the hassles of traveling to the library, running the risk of either missing or not being able to find the correct book or article and having to wait for information to be sent to the school for the research paper. It is that ease of access which Questia hopes to appeal to.
But University of Maine research librarian Christine Whittington does not believe that sites like Questia.com, ebrary.com or netLibrary.com will keep student from the mortar and stone buildings. In fact, through the Fogler Library and URSUS, the campus can utilize netlibrary.com. However, she does believe that online library services provide the beginning tools for students to use when they are researching.
According to the publication Student Monitor 2000, almost 70 percent of students do not live on campus and must travel to the library. Students average about eight papers a year for classes with 56 percent spending 12 to 14 hours of research time on each assigned paper. Student Monitor 2000 says that 43 percent of students use the Internet as a major source of research, spending about eight hours a week online and 66 percent go online at least once a day.
Without a model to go by, but the understanding that the best subscription Web sites around are the ones which are content rich, Questia was developed to alleviate the hassles and frustrations Williams experienced. And while his Web site and company are aimed primarily at scholars and current students, anyone can use the site as long as they are hooked up to the Internet.
Currently Questia says it employs 280 people in offices in Texas, New York and Los Angeles. They have, to date, raised over $135 million in capital and are funded by private individuals as well as the venture capital firm TA Associates of Boston, Oppenheimer’s Emerging Technology and Aggressive Growth Funds, Bulldog Capital Management and Palmetto Partners. And with a management team including people from Compaq, Disney and Harper Collins Publishers.
It is unknown how many subscribers questia.com has and how many people have visited their site thus far.
The Web site offers researchers the ability to copy and print pages on their printers, as well as footnote, prepare bibliographies, hyperlink text, annotate information, highlight information and use online dictionaries and thesauri. These tools, the site says, are meant to help the researcher, but they will not write the paper for them.
But all this comes with a price attached. The writer must register to use the Web site, and registering means paying one of three subscription prices. Annually, unlimited access to Questia will cost the user $149.95 whereas the rate drops to $19.95 per month and for a 48-hour use, the researcher pays $14.95. It’s free to browse through the site, but to do more than just look at titles, you must be a subscriber. The Web site accepts credits cards as well as check cards. Questia does not use micropayments yet, which allow the user to be billed through an online billing company.
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