Tara Blair

Tara Blair is a Digital Marketing Specialist for Gale, a Cengage Company. In her spare time, she is a total crime junkie and spends her days listening to podcasts—especially those of the unsolved.

Who is Thomas Watters?

Posted March 7, 2016

By Yang Liping

I was checking through the transcript of Diaries and Travel Journals of Ernest Satow (a British diplomat who made his career in China and Japan) the other day when I came across the name of “Thomas Watters”.  Satow met and had dinner with him on November 4, 1883 during the former’s holiday leave in London.

T. Watters of the China consular service . . . dined with me at the Oriental Club, and then came to my room in Welbeck Street, to inspect Japse. books on Buddhism. I gave Watters the larger part of my collection.

The paragraph above indicates that Thomas Watters worked for the China consular service. But why did Satow want to show him his collection of Japanese books on Buddhism? This curiosity drove me to conduct a research on him in China From Empire to Republic: Missionary, Sinology, and Literary Periodicals, a digital collection I have been working on since 2014.

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Former First Lady Nancy Reagan: Her Life, Her Legacy

Posted on March 7, 2016

By Traci Cothran

NANCY REAGAN   (July 6, 1921 – March 6, 2016)

The eulogies are pouring in for former first lady Nancy Reagan – an actress, mother, and fierce supporter of her husband, Ronald Reagan.  As her passing happens amidst a contentious presidential race, we are reminded of a time of greater decorum in our democracy.

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Gale’s InfoTrac Collections Add “Related Resources” Feature

Posted on March 4, 2016

By Sara Constantakis, Senior Content Developer, Journal Aggregation, Gale

Beginning March 7th, users of Gale’s InfoTrac periodical collections—like Academic OneFile, General OneFile, and InfoTrac Newsstand—will enjoy exciting new functionality. When viewing an article, the “Related Resources” feature recommends additional content of interest, providing a more dynamic, relevant presentation of related content.

To view recommended content from within the product, users can click the “Related Resources” button at the top of the article and scroll through the top 12 results, located below the citation. When searching via PowerSearch, results will be pulled from all applicable content.

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New Titles Added to the InfoTrac Collections in February 2016

The titles below have been recently added and can be located in the product using Basic or Advanced Search forms. Titles can be found via Browse Publications within two weeks. For complete coverage information please see the product title lists.

Academic OneFile

  • A Pragmatic Plan for Housing Finance Reform (Milken Institute)
  • AASA Journal of Scholarship & Practice (American Association of School Administrators) 1931-6569 Peer-reviewed
  • American Jails (American Jail Association) 1056-0319
  • Biomarker Research (BioMed Central Ltd.) 2050-7771 Peer-reviewed
  • Breaking (Banks) Up Is Hard To Do: New Perspective on “Too Big To Fail” (Milken Institute)
  • Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience (Frontiers Research Foundation) 1663-4365 Peer-reviewed

Read moreNew Titles Added to the InfoTrac Collections in February 2016

Flit, Float, Fly Away

Posted on March 3, 2016

By Candy Jones-Guerin

Spring is on the way and we can’t wait to start exploring outside. There are a lot of fun ways to help quench spring fever in your classroom and on March 14th you have the perfect opportunity with ‘National Learn About Butterflies Day’!

Does your school have a butterfly garden? Are there opportunities to watch a butterfly emerge from his chrysalis in your classroom? Do you use butterflies to talk about the life cycle? We have a collection of Gale titles for grade school and middle school classes to help get you going. Take a peek and let us know how you will be integrating these resources and more in your classroom.

Butterflies and Moths, 1st Edition
This book describes and compares the physical characteristics, habitat, behavior, life cycle, diet, and reproduction of these amazing insects.

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Discovering History Through Digital Newspaper Collections

Posted on March 2, 2016

By Seth Cayley

Can cocaine really cure sea-sickness? Something tells me that very little peer-reviewed research has been done on the subject in recent years. But that didn’t stop the Victorians. From around 1870-1915 a large number of narcotics, including heroin, were widely and legally available, and often packaged as medicines. Historians have dubbed this period before the first international drug control treaties as “The Great Binge”.

I first came across The Great Binge when browsing through bound volumes of the Illustrated London News for the first time at university. While I was supposed to be looking for news items about pre-First World War Europe, my eyes kept on being drawn to the adverts. Leafing through these, I learnt that: smoking Joy’s cigarettes could help with bronchitis; a certain brand of men’s underwear does not shrink; and that an electric hairbrush could cure my “nervous headache” (although I was pretty certain my headache that day had other causes common to students).

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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

CLiC Helps Lighten the Load

Posted on March 1, 2016

By Megan McCarthy

When I was little I used to love reading the Encyclopedia Britannica. We had one full set, and I think it was published in 1968. I would write all my papers using those encyclopedias. It wasn’t until high school that it occurred to me the information might be out-of-date. It was the same with textbooks. There were names of students on my pre-owned textbooks that I knew had graduated college. What’s more, those books were heavy. I remember dragging my loaded book bag to and from school. I thought my arms would break. Now, with CLiC, those days are gone.

CLiC (Classroom in Context) is a digital curriculum that pulls its content from Gale’s award-winning In Context databases. In Context is dynamically updated, so the content is always current. Not only are the six CLiC curriculums designed to meet state, national and Common Core standards, they are also endlessly customizable. Teachers can add in videos, podcasts, articles, and even their own materials. And all of this flexibility is available for students on their tablets and laptops. So out-of-date textbooks and encyclopedias are a thing of the past.

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Kids InfoBits Product Update week of 2/22/2016

Posted on February 24, 2016 You’ll see a few new updates and features added to Kids InfoBits starting March 9th. Here is what you’ll find: Are your students struggling with the meaning or definition of words in articles? Kids InfoBits now has easy access to the Merriam Webster Elementary Dictionary within the product. To assist students … Read more

When News Breaks, Library Users Can Stay Informed with Gale’s Periodical Collections

Posted 2/24/2016

By Sara Constantakis, Senior Content Developer, Journal Aggregation, Gale

When news hits the headlines, the flood of information begins immediately. Gale’s InfoTrac collections–like Academic OneFile, General OneFile, and InfoTrac Newsstand–rise above the rest to bring users timely and curated content from the world’s leading magazines, journals, and news sources. When a hot topic is racing around the headlines, InfoTrac’s highly responsive subject indexing quickly connects users with the most up-to-date and relevant information.

Read moreWhen News Breaks, Library Users Can Stay Informed with Gale’s Periodical Collections