Acquisition news: EBSCO acquires H.W. Wilson
Jinfo Blog

By Nancy Davis Kho

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EBSCO Publishing announced today that it has acquired The H.W. Wilson Company, in a move seen by industry observers as a gambit to incorporate Wilson's highly-regarded indexing services into EBSCO products to add value for its library reference customers. No details on the purchase price were released, and the official company press statement refers to a "merger". But with annual revenues of $40 million and 450 employees for Wilson vs. $2,400 million and 6,000 employees for EBSCO (figures from Hoovers.com), it's a clear case of a little fish getting swallowed.

It's a smart acquisition for EBSCO; Wilson's subject thesaurus and "names" authority file are highly regarded, and incorporating them into EBSCO's controlled vocabularies will give a bump in search accuracy to EBSCO users.  

Whether it bodes as well for Wilson users remains to be seen as their subscriptions slowly migrate to  EBSCO products. Fans of the WilsonWeb search interface need to brace for change since, according to the official press release, "Wilson databases will be loaded onto EBSCOhost over the coming months.  EBSCO will continue to maintain WilsonWeb until such time that all Wilson databases are available on EBSCOhost and customers have been transitioned to EBSCOhost". EBSCO also plans to phase out Wilson CD-ROM subscriptions by the end of the year. An FAQ for Wilson customers on the acquisition is available here.

Twitter reactions on the announcement from the library community range from "least surprising news ever" to "resistance is futile". Too true: with the acquisition of Wilson, EBSCO buys out a competitor and improves its products in one fell swoop. EBSCO customers stand to gain in functionality benefits if the integration happens as planned, but it's one less vendor on the landscape driving price competition and product improvements.

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