Metadata from Mergent, Inc.’s Annual Reports Database to be added to Base Index of EBSCO Discovery Service^™

Fort Mill SC, January 13^th, 2011– Mergent, Inc. today announced an agreement with EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO), allowing metadata from Mergent’s Annual Reports Database, to be added to the Base Index of EBSCO Discovery Service^™ (EDS). The addition of Mergent resources to the EDS Base Index enhances the quality of metadata available and brings added value to EDS customers.

Mergent’s Annual Reports Database includes more than 300,000 annual reports from global publicly traded companies and is continually updated throughout the year. Metadata from Mergent’s collection will also include archived annual reports dating back ten years. Additional collections from Mergent may be added to the Base Index of EDS in the future. 

The EDS Base Index is comprised of metadata from the world’s foremost information providers. At present, the EDS Base Index represents content from approximately 20,000 providers in addition to metadata from another 70,000 book publishers. Although constantly growing, today the EDS Base Index provides metadata for nearly 50,000 magazines & journals, approximately 825,000 CDs & DVDs, nearly six million books, more than 100 million newspaper articles, more than 20,000 conference proceedings and hundreds of thousands of additional information sources from various source-types.

Founded in 1900, Mergent has become a leading provider of business and financial data on global publicly listed companies. The company is based in the U.S. but maintains a strong global presence, with offices in New York, Charlotte, San Diego, London, Tokyo and Melbourne.

About Mergent

Mergent, Inc. is a leading provider of business and financial information on global publicly listed companies. Based in the U.S., the company maintains a strong international presence, with offices in New York, Fort Mill, San Diego, London, Tokyo and Melbourne. With roots tracing back to 1900, Mergent operates one of the longest continuously collected databases of: descriptive and fundamental information on domestic and international companies; pricing and terms and conditions data on fixed income and equity securities; and corporate action data. Mergent delivers this data through desktop applications, data feeds and other custom services to a global client base. For more information, visit http://www.mergent.com

About EBSCO Publishing

EBSCO Publishing is the world’s premier database aggregator, offering a suite of nearly 300 full-text and secondary research databases. Through a library of tens of thousands of full-text journals, magazines, books, monographs, reports and various other publication types from renowned publishers, EBSCO serves the content needs of all researchers (Academic, Medical, K-12, Public Library, Corporate, Government, etc.). The company’s product lines include proprietary databases such as Academic Search^™, Business Source^®, CINAHL^®, DynaMed^™, Literary Reference Center^™, MasterFILE^™, NoveList^®, SocINDEX^™ and SPORTDiscus^™ as well as dozens of leading licensed databases such as ATLA Religion Database^™, EconLit, INSPEC^®, MEDLINE^®, MLA International Bibliography, The Philosopher’s Index^™, PsycARTICLES^®, PsycINFO^® and RILM^™. Databases are powered by EBSCOhost^®, the most-used for-fee electronic resource in libraries around the world.

EBSCO is the provider of EBSCO Discovery Service^™ a core collection of locally-indexed metadata creating a unified index of an institution’s resources within a single, customizable search point providing everything the researcher needs in one place—fast, simple access to the library’s full text content, deeper indexing and more full-text searching of more journals and magazines than any other discovery service (www.ebscohost.com/discovery). For more information, visit the EBSCO Publishing Web site at: www.ebscohost.com, or contact: information@ebscohost.com. EBSCO Publishing is a division of EBSCO Industries Inc., one of the largest privately held companies in the United States.

FIRSTRAIN PARTNERS WITH MERGENT TO DELIVER STREAMLINED WEB CONTENT THROUGH MERGENT ONLINESearch-Driven Research Provides a Broader Perspective of Web CoverageSan Mateo, Calif., September 14, 2009 - FirstRain® today announced it has partnered with Mergent, Inc., to deliver unique web content through their market-leading Mergent Online platform. The FirstRain research engine will provide a continually updated data stream of high quality web results that will allow Mergent Online clients to quickly and efficiently discover web information that is essential to their research. This partnership represents an expanded data set of web sources, to include not only mainstream sources, but also differentiated and targeted content, such as industry journals and blogs.FirstRain is the leader in identifying, extracting and analyzing qualitative information from the web on companies, business topics and markets for professional business users. The research engine technology allows users to be confident in the precision, relevancy and cleanliness of the content that is retrieved. FirstRain’s proprietary algorithms identify and extract content from a vast range of web sources from around the world. Categorization then identifies and creates relationships between companies and among business topics creating an ecosystem - a holistic approach to company research and monitoring. This allows FirstRain to provide comparative and meaningful analytics by highlighting trends and relationships from qualitative data.”Our partnership with FirstRain significantly improves the qualitative intelligence we are able to provide by identifying content from a broad range of sources,” said John Pedernales, Mergent’s Executive Managing Director and Director of Equity Research. “Integrating results from FirstRain into our platform for academic, corporate, public and government libraries allows our clients to have a richer, more complete research experience. The business relevant content delivered by FirstRain complements our offering and empowers our clients to quickly and efficiently find information that is most relevant to their research.”"We are delighted to have been selected by Mergent to power the business news capabilities on the Mergent Online platform,” said Penny Herscher, President and CEO of FirstRain. “This partnership takes advantage of FirstRain’s unique ability to deliver quality, new and interesting - and highly categorized - web information that provides value to users doing qualitative research in any information platform.”About FirstRainFirstRain provides a new and unique way for business professionals to leverage search technology as part of their research process. Our research engine intelligently filters the most insightful information and trends from the web about companies, the markets they operate in, and the business trends impacting their market. FirstRain’s technology also pulls together information from across the web revealing interesting and useful analytics that signal opportunities for Sales, Marketing, Competitive Intelligence, Investor Relations and Investment Management professionals. Our partners include leading research platforms such as Capital IQ (a division of Standard & Poor’s), Code:Red, FactSet Research Systems, Mergent and Wall Street On Demand. FirstRain is a privately held company headquartered in San Mateo, Calif., with additional offices in New York, NY and Gurgaon, India. For more information, contact FirstRain at www.firstrain.com.About MergentMergent, Inc. is a leading provider of business and financial data on global publicly listed companies. Based in the U.S, the company maintains a strong global presence, with offices in New York, Fort Mill, San Diego, London, Tokyo and Melbourne.Founded in 1900, Mergent operates the longest continuously collected database of: descriptive and fundamental information on domestic and international companies; pricing and terms and conditions data on fixed income and equity securities; and corporate action data. In addition, Mergent develops and licenses equity and fixed income investment products based on its proprietary investment methodologies. Mergent-licensed products have over $3.5 billion in assets under management and are offered by major investment management firms. Mergent’s index calculation platform is the chosen technology for some of the world’s largest index companies. Its index calculation and pricing distribution protocols are used to administer index rules and distribute real-time pricing data. For more information, visit

August 21, 2009 02:06 PM Eastern Daylight Time  

MGE Energy Increases Dividend for 34th Consecutive Year

Company has paid cash dividends for more than 100 years

MADISON, Wis.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The board of directors of MGE Energy, Inc. (Nasdaq: MGEE) today increased the regular quarterly dividend to $0.3684 per share on the company’s common stock. The dividend is payable Sept. 15, 2009, to shareholders of record Sept. 1, 2009. With this increase, the new dividend is equivalent to an annual rate of $1.4736 per share.

“MGE Energy is one of only 58 U.S. companies that have paid annual dividends for more than 100 years,” said Gary J. Wolter, MGE Energy’s chairman, president and CEO.

The company has increased its dividends annually for the past 34 years. MGE Energy is listed as a “Dividend Achiever” by Mergent, Inc., a financial information publisher for more than a century. Just 10% of all dividend-paying companies meet the Mergent test of increasing dividends annually for at least 10 years.

MGE Energy is a public utility holding company. Its principal subsidiary, Madison Gas and Electric (MGE), generates and distributes electricity to 137,000 customers in Dane County, Wis., and purchases and distributes natural gas to 141,000 customers in seven south-central and western Wisconsin counties. MGE’s roots in the Madison area date back more than 150 years.