Academic Archives | Page 74 of 96 | Gale Blog: Library & Educator News

Tales for the ‘Every-day Reader’: Winston Churchill and the ‘War in the Indian Highlands’

January 5, 2016December 14, 2015

Posted on December 14, 2015

By: Daniel Pullin, Publishing Assistant, Gale, a part of Cengage Learning

When the name ‘Winston Churchill’ is mentioned, images of a heroic war leader with cigar in mouth and face set in steely determination are usually the first to come to mind. His wartime speeches became iconic in symbolising gung-ho British determination to battle on through endless bloodshed, helping steer Britain through the turmoil of a cataclysmic conflict. Yet, with perhaps less well-known flair, the former Prime Minister proved equally adept on paper. This is evident in his first published material: a series of war letters commissioned for British newspaper The Daily Telegraph.

Between October and December 1897, Churchill wrote and published the eleven letters while accompanying the Malakand Field Force in India. With Gale’s The Telegraph Historical Archive, 1855-2000 now available, these letters are fully-searchable in digital format for the first time. This gave me the perfect opportunity to explore their contents.

The Hunger Games, Classroom Lessons

January 5, 2016November 20, 2015

Posted on November 20, 2015

By Traci J. Cothran

Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2 has finally hit the big screen, enthralling young minds with the drama, action and adventures of Katniss Everdeen. Nestled in with all the unfavorable odds and pageantry are real issues that students can explore – while flexing their critical thinking skills – under this pop culture umbrella.

Global Warming and Climate Change. In The Hunger Games, the US has collapsed following a devastating series of drought, fire and storms, resulting in a fight for the remaining limited resources. The resulting society, Panem, rose in its wake. Science In Context provides factual overviews as well as in-depth articles on global warming, air pollution, and their lasting effects.

Gale Technical Solutions: Think Like a User

November 4, 2015November 2, 2015

Posted on November 4, 2015

By Scott Steward

Welcome back. Last time, I gave you the first tip for organizing your electronic resources: using context. Today, I’d like to help you think like a user.

It doesn’t really matter if your user is a patron, student, teacher, or facility. At the end of the day, they all need to be able to find what they’re looking for, and if they can’t, they’ll go somewhere else. So, let’s make it easier for them.

Gale and Google Together for Success

January 5, 2016October 30, 2015

Posted on October 30, 2015

With more than 45 million Google Apps for Education users worldwide and an average of over 40,000 Google search engine queries per second ^[1], Google is indisputably the place where people get their answers.

As the library seeks to continue to be a valued educational partner in communities, schools, and institutions, bringing trustworthy digital content into the natural path of the student or patron has never been more important. To make it easier for people to find and use this relevant, authoritative information, Gale, a part of Cengage Learning, has partnered with Google for Education in two ways: providing intuitive integration of popular workflow tools through Google Apps for Education and indexing content in Google Scholar.

This new relationship exemplifies Gale’s effort to be a leading provider of educational technology, instructional tools, and content to help our users be successful in school, work, and life.

Gale & Google Apps for Education

The ability for students to seamlessly login using Google Account credentials is now available through:

Introducing Gale EduCast

November 20, 2015October 13, 2015

Introducing Gale EduCast, innovative solutions, ideas, and perspectives for faculty and librarians leading the charge in education. Join us as we identify a problem, provide a solution and the story behind the solution, and answer your questions.

Upcoming Gale EduCasts:

October 14 @ 1:30 pm ET

Gale Virtual Reference Library is the platform for building an online collection of specialized reference sources and scholarly monographs, also known as eBooks, for multidisciplinary research. In addition to being the premier research environment for the Gale published imprints, such as Macmillan Reference USA, Charles Scribner’s Sons, and St. James Press, and others, GVRL offers an ideal user experience for content from more than 100 partner publishers, including Sage, Lippincott Williams & Wilkens, and Elsevier.

TEL & Career Transitions: Connecting People with Jobs

February 11, 2019October 8, 2015

By Steven Hicks and Kim Martin

For job seekers, libraries play a crucial role in career discovery, development, and overall assistance. In fact, almost one quarter of library visitors are there to look or apply for a job, according to the Pew Research Center.^1. To further solidify the library’s role as a hub for employment resources, in July, 2014 President Obama signed into law the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, identifying public libraries as potential partners of the American Job Center network, and acknowledging libraries’ ability to provide an expansive array of job search services.

Career Transitions, an online resource from Gale, assists users with career exploration and offers a complete, personalized and guided experience from assessing strengths and interests, to finding new career opportunities, to ultimately completing professional resumes and improving the chances of landing jobs.

Gale Technical Solutions: Organizing Electronic Resource Pages

November 4, 2015October 7, 2015

By Scott Steward

Let’s talk about some best practices for organizing electronic resource pages.

It doesn’t matter if you are an academic, K12, public, or special library; if you boil down what we do to its simplest definition, our primary goal is to connect people to information.

Our users are already using tools like Google and Bing in their everyday lives to find information. E.g. Who makes the best cup of coffee? What is the cheapest flight to Las Vegas? What is the carrying weight of a swallow?

Supporting Your Local Data Miner

November 4, 2015September 17, 2015

By: Dr. Dallas Liddle, Associate Professor and Chair of English, Augsburg College

Marshall McLuhan is supposed to have said that “the content of a new medium is always an old medium.” He intended the observation as wry cultural criticism,

What I Did on My Summer Vacation: A Gale Intern’s Story

November 20, 2015September 15, 2015

by Luiza Lodder

As an English major from Penn State University, I was pleased to work as a content development intern for Gale this summer, managing academic and educational online resources and databases. My goal was to explore publishing and apply my skills and interests. Although I was placed in the Boston office, my supervisor and team were located in Michigan. Yet in spite of working remotely, I felt fully engaged with the work and the team.

Part of my responsibilities included updating Gale literature databases and maintaining content. For example, I input author birthdates and death dates, recent prizes won, and recent developments such as book publications or adaptations. One of Gale’s long-term goals is to make classic works available online to customers; I helped by identifying which works were already public domain and which were still protected by publication rights. Being an international student from Brazil, I enjoyed a bonus experience that was fun for me and uniquely useful to Gale: translating an interview of Brazilian users recorded by Gale market researchers.

Gale Technical Solutions: Branding

October 13, 2015September 15, 2015

By Scott Steward

Welcome back to the Gale Technical Solutions blog series!

I thought it would be good to start with some of the basics. Today, I will be discussing Branding.

Now when I say branding, I’m not talking about the Gale brand; I’m talking about your library’s brand within your Gale products. Did you know all Gale products have dedicated space reserved in the interface for your library’s branding? In this reserved area we can display text, an image, or some custom code (Javascript, PHP, HTML, jQuery, etc).