Academic

TEL & Career Transitions: Connecting People with Jobs

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.

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Gale Technical Solutions: Organizing Electronic Resource Pages

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? 

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Supporting Your Local Data Miner

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, 

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

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.

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Gale Technical Solutions: Branding

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).

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Comparative Review: Opposing Viewpoints in Context and Points of View Reference Center

The results are in: Opposing Viewpoints In Context is the clear winner! In an issue of The Charleston Review, Susan Moore of Limestone pitted Gale’s Opposing Viewpoints In Context (OVIC) against EBSCO’s Points of View Reference Center (POV).

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Gale Technical Solutions: Custom Solutions for Your Library

By. Scott Steward

Gale, a part of Cengage Learning understands that each library has its own set of unique needs, and what works for one library may not work for another.  We know that in many cases the “one size fits all” approach to implementation is a compromise to what is just good enough. Instead of making you settle for what is just good enough, Gale wants you and your users to have the best possible experience using our products, and sometimes that requires a custom solution.

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August Spotlight:  Back-to-School!

By Gale Training

Each month, the Gale Training team spotlights new and featured resources to give you ideas on how to use training at your school or library. For On-demand tutorials, Webinars, Materials, and more, visit the Resource Training Center. Below is this month’s “Training Spotlight.”

Say it with us …”Where has the summer gone?”

Seems like back-to-school time just sneaks up on us. Are you ready?

Read moreAugust Spotlight:  Back-to-School!