Gale Access Program Success Report: What a Difference a Year Makes

| By Gale Staff | Read this Gale report on how one program is increasing database usage and lowering collection costs for libraries. Support student success. For academic librarians, that goal is what motivates purchasing and collection development decisions. But it’s not always an easy task. With 80–90% of academic libraries facing flat or declining … Read more

MHSLA Praises Gale’s Health & Wellness Resource Center

The Michigan Health Sciences Libraries Association (MHSLA) is a membership-based committee full of those actively engaged or interested in health sciences information management.  Their purpose is to promote excellence in health sciences librarianship by providing its membership with opportunities for professional growth, fostering communication between members and their regions, facilitating resource sharing, increasing awareness of … Read more

Product Update: Exciting Video Additions and Increased Text Size to Kids InfoBits!

Recently, Gale partnered with Visual Learning Systems, an educational science publisher whose mission is to provide high quality, visual-based content that instructs, challenges, and inspires young learners. Nearly 600 high-quality educational videos on concepts essential to STEM learning have been added to Kids InfoBits. These recently added and powerful teaching tools are approximately 1-3 minutes … Read more

Enhance Research with Opposing Viewpoints In Context

By Holly Hibner If there’s one source I love during a presidential election year, it is the Opposing Viewpoints In Context database! This is a librarian’s dream because our patrons are looking for information on all kinds of controversial topics, and matching their own stance to that of the candidates. Opposing Viewpoints presents all sides … Read more

Gale Helps Cody High School Discover MeL Resources

Posted on April 21, 2016

By Tracey L. Matthews

Some schools acquire Gale resources on a state-wide level, offering broad access to our authoritative resources. But not everyone knows they’re available. Detroit’s (MI) Cody Academy of Public Leadership is one example.

In the course of setting up a mentoring program nearly two years ago with Cody High School’s Academy of Public Leadership, one of the first things we learned was that the staff was unaware they had access to any reference content. Like many other schools in the Detroit school district, their media specialist positions had been eliminated, leaving busy and challenged teachers with no help identifying resources for their students, who not surprisingly relied primarily on Google for their research needs.

Our first service to Cody was to hold a training session with Cody staff to introduce them to the Michigan Electronic Library (MeL), through which they had easy access to a wide variety of reference and periodical databases, including Gale products like Opposing Viewpoints In Context.

Read moreGale Helps Cody High School Discover MeL Resources

Providing the Right Resources for On-the-Go Students: One School’s Story

Posted on March 2, 2016 Kris Jacobson is a teacher/librarian at a busy high school outside of Chicago. With 3,000 students and a campus that recently went 1:1 with Chromebooks, Kris stays busy, but is constantly striving to make the library more useful for patrons. Kris found that helping students conduct research in multiple information … Read more

Driving Electronic Content Discovery and Usage: Collaboration – Part 1

Posted on August 31, 2015
Posted by Jan Snyder and Jennifer Maurer

As librarians, we feel privileged to have a very rich collection of Gale databases and eBooks at our fingertips to use with students and staff, at zero cost to us, through the Oregon State Library’s Statewide Database Licensing Program. This allows for statewide access to a wide range of vetted information, on unlimited topics, for use by our patrons. These same databases are available at K-16 throughout Oregon, as well as at public libraries, for use by all state residents. In talking with librarian friends across the country, we know that we enjoy a benefit not available in many states.

Funding for the statewide databases comes from a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant.  Another grant project was initiated some 15 years ago, when members of the Oregon Association of School Libraries (OASL) and Oregon State Library staff shared concerns about access to information literacy resources for students and teachers, as the number of licensed school librarians employed across the state declined. OASL applied for a LSTA grant from the State Library to create OSLIS, or the Oregon School Library Information System, and that has become a continuing statewide project. In addition to offering information literacy resources and citation generators in MLA and APA formats, OSLIS serves as the K-12 access point for the statewide databases.

Having statewide central access to the databases provides consistency for students as they move from elementary to middle school and then high school. It also means that students and educators served by school library staff who are not familiar with how to link directly to databases still have access to statewide resources.

Read moreDriving Electronic Content Discovery and Usage: Collaboration – Part 1

Educators Embrace Technology to Verify Digital Resource Quality

GVRL eBook Success Story

Lauren Stokes, the Virtual Library Manager at the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District, often envisions customers in their bedtime pajamas. “I want them to be nice and comfortable,” Stokes joked. Stokes has good reason to picture users in this manner. It’s her job to ensure the 1.2 million people served by the 25 libraries in her county not only have access to but are using the district’s investment of digital resources.

To accomplish her goal, Stokes first had to convince educators and customers the library’s digital offerings were of the same quality as its print collection. “It just didn’t seem to click that it’s the same content whether you’re looking at it online or on a piece of paper,” Stokes said.

Read moreEducators Embrace Technology to Verify Digital Resource Quality

Re-thinking Ready Reference with GVRL

nonfiction ebooks

By Holly Hibner and Mary Kelly

In the olden days before computers, ready reference collections were the soul of a library. Librarians helping patrons to answer questions or understand a topic always started in the reference section of the library. They were the most expensive materials and librarians were vigilant in guarding those precious items. I have been admonished by a librarian more than once for not handling these books carefully.

Ready reference collections have adapted to the new world of instant access, anywhere and anytime. Patrons still have questions and are trying to understand topics as always, but now they want it faster, more convenient, and always reliable. The reference need is still there, but now librarians have to think about access and delivery to patrons.

Read moreRe-thinking Ready Reference with GVRL