"We are excited about the combination of bigchalk and ProQuest electronic resources for our customers," said Alan Aldworth, President and Chief Executive Officer of ProQuest Company. "ProQuest has a history of working closely with bigchalk, and we are very familiar with its products. This acquisition provides opportunities to expand distribution of existing products from both companies into their various markets. It also allows greater opportunity to develop new products, drawing from an increased number and range of content sources."

"With the acquisition of bigchalk, ProQuest becomes a leader in the growing K-12 marketplace," added Aldworth.

According to Rod Gauvin, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing for ProQuest Information and Learning,"With the addition of bigchalk products, we will be able to fully meet the needs of multi-type library consortia with a seamless set of electronic reference products serving Kindergarten through post-graduate researchers."

bigchalk was founded in 1999, with the combined the assets of ProQuest's K-12 division and Infonautic's K-12 business including eLibrary^TM. bigchalk products include: bigchalk Library^TM, eLibrary, bigchalk Integrated Classroom^TM, ClassMate^TM, and other Web-based products. No immediate changes to product offerings are planned. Customer service and technical support contacts will remain unchanged for customers until further notice.

Some of the statements contained herein constitute forward-looking statements. These statements relate to future events or the future financial performance and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause our or our markets' actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements expressed, or implied by such forward-looking statements. These risks and other factors you should specifically consider include, among other things, the company's ability to successfully integrate acquired companies and reduce costs, global economic conditions, product demand, financial market performance, and other risks listed under "Risk Factors" in our regular filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as "may," "will," "should," "expects," "plans," "anticipates," "believes," "estimates," "predicts," "potential," "continue," "projects," "intends," or the negative of such terms or other comparable terminology. These statements are only predictions. Actual events or results may differ materially. We are under no obligation to update or revise any of these forward-looking statements.

ProQuest Company (NYSE: PQE) is based in Ann Arbor, Mich., and is a leading provider of value-added information and content to the library and education, and automotive and powersports industries. We provide products and services to our customers through two business segments: Information & Learning and Business Solutions. Through our Information & Learning segment, which primarily serves the library and education markets, we aggregate and publish value-added content from a wide range of sources including newspapers, periodicals and books. Our Business Solutions segment, formerly known as Bell & Howell Publishing Services, is primarily engaged in the delivery in electronic form of comprehensive parts information to the automotive market. It also provides dealers in the powersports (motorcycle, marine and RV) markets with management systems that enable them to manage their inventory, customer service and other aspects of their businesses.

ProQuest Information and Learning is a world leader in collecting, organizing, and distributing information worldwide to researchers, faculty, and students in libraries and schools. Known widely for its strength in business and economics, general-reference, humanities, social sciences, and STM content, the company develops premium databases comprising periodicals, newspapers, dissertations, out-of-print books, and other scholarly information from more than 8,500 publishers worldwide. Users access the information through the ProQuest® Web-based online information system, Chadwyck-Healey^TM electronic and microform resources, UMI® microform and print reference products, bigchalk^TM educational resources, and XanEdu^TM online faculty and student resources. For more information about ProQuest Information and Learning, visit www.il.proquest.com.